I Drove The 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz. What Do You Want To Know?

August 8, 2021

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Image for article titled I Drove The 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz. What Do You Want To Know? — Photo: Elizabeth Blackstock

This past week, Hyundai invited some members of the press to drive the 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz for the first time. I was one of the folks invited on that trip, and I’m ready to answer your questions in an upcoming review. What do you want to know?

I can’t share driving impressions of the vehicle yet due to embargoes, so I won’t be able to answer any questions in the comments of this post. But before I write up my review, I thought I would consult the fine people of Jalopnik about what they’d like to read. What questions have you been wondering that I can help you answer?

As a reminder, this vehicle is a little something strange, like a crossover and a pickup truck had a baby. People have compared it to the El Camino and the Subaru Baja, both of which were beloved by a niche contingent of folks but not enough to actually keep these cars in production. The car-with-a-truck-bed just hasn’t really hit it off, but Hyundai is confident that things will be different this time around. I’ll definitely chat more about that in my review; the brand has some really interesting ideas about how it wants to position the Santa Cruz in the larger car market.

I can give you some of the main details of my drive. We navigated around a variety of Northern California roads, everything from twisty mountain paths to stretching coastal roads. Journalists were handed the top-of-the-line trim, which clocks in at around $40,000, though the base model is a pretty affordable $24,000. Hyundai didn’t have any of the other trims available for review, but I did get to take a cruise in the Hyundai Kona N — a review for a later time.

I will say one thing, though: I had more people stop to ask me about the Santa Cruz than I’ve ever had in any other press car. Part of that is its novelty; it’s not a common thing to see a vehicle that looks like a crossover from the front and a pickup from the back. One of those people, an older gentleman changing a dirty tire that he had to place in his carpeted SUV trunk, even said he’d consider this instead of the Subaru Crosstrek that he had previously been eyeing.

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