The Hyundai HCD-15 Santa Cruz was one of many greatest hits of the North American Worldwide Auto Present again in 2015. A yr later, the corporate promised {that a} manufacturing model was a matter of when, not if. Effectively, it has been half a decade since then, however the Santa Cruz is lastly occurring.
Forward of the Santa Cruz’s April 15 unveil, Hyundai has launched a video from its design studio in California speaking concerning the new, effectively, not-truck. Sure, Hyundai is adamant that “it is not a truck,” as design supervisor of Hyundai North America Brad Arnold states within the video. “It is a Santa Cruz,” he concludes. So, um, it is a metropolis? A skateboard model? A faculty whose mascot is the banana slug?
Seems, it was meant for the town before everything. “It is meant to thrive in dense city environments, and the open outdoor,” Arnold states, however the order right here appears vital. In response to spy photographs, it shares rather a lot with the Tucson, and nobody would mistake that CUV for being an off-roader.
The unibody structure with a pickup mattress is what Australians would name a ute, but it surely’s additionally completely different than the type greatest embodied by the Chevy El Camino and Ford Ranchero. These had been low to the bottom and had solely a mattress for cargo. The Santa Cruz, nevertheless, may have “each open and closed storage,” in line with Arnold.
So it is extra like a Ridgeline, then? Not fairly, as a result of if it is based mostly on a Tucson it’s going to be one class smaller than Honda’s midsizer. Perform-wise, it appears to fill the void left by the 2WD pickups of the 1970s and 80s, from firms like Toyota, Datsun, Mitsubishi and Isuzu. Nevertheless, these had been of body-on-frame development, not unibody.
So maybe the Santa Cruz actually is in a category of its personal. The Santa Cruz debuts April 15, and even when it has been six years because the idea, not less than Hyundai retains its guarantees. Additionally, it is not daily that you just get to be in a section of 1. That’s, till the 2022 Ford Maverick enters the market.
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