Hyundai Santa Fe 2021 review: Highlander petrol

The 2021 update isn't immediately obvious. I related this story to my modest Twitter following. I went out one morning for a drive in my own car to check something number one son thought was happening. I passed the car on the driveway and noticed the Santa Fe - parked on the street - had a big scrape on the left-hand side of the bumper, as though one of us had misjudged a concrete bollard. 

Cursing myself as I lapped the suburb I came back and realised that, actually, that was next door's blue 2018 Santa Fe, not the chocolatey goodness of the 2021 Santa Fe on my driveway.  I even laid hands on the blue one as I rubbed the scrape hoping it was chalk, as though I'd driven along the beach in Dover.

The Santa Fe's 2021 update isn't immediately obvious.

Anyway, everyone laughed at me, which is a good result on Twitter.

The  point is that it's not immediately obvious what's happened in terms of changes, but it's quite a bit. There's a new grille, T-shaped daytime running lights and a general tightening has freshened things up, while ditching the unconvincing nature of the old grille. Out back, there's a Porsche-alike full-width reflector strip and the new 20-inch wheels are quite arresting to look at.

The Santa Fe Highlander wears 20-inch alloy wheels.

Inside, the Highlander scores the Palisade's flying console, the big new screen and a host of tweaks also make the Santa Fe's interior a lot more technical and, given it's the Highlander, separate it from the rest of the 2021 pack with a different look, helping (one imagines) the case for the more expensive variant.

The fourth generation Santa Fes all have seven seats as standard now. The third row still isn't exactly a suite at the Ritz, it's more of a capsule hotel adjacent to a Japanese train station, and even then, you'll want to be under 150cm tall. If you want more space back there, you might want to look at the Santa Fe's even bigger sibling, the Palisade. 

All Santa Fes now come with seven seats as standard.

Even with all seats in place, you start with 130 litres of cargo space. Fold those seats away and you get 571 litres, 24 more than the pre-facelift car.

The Santa Fe's six cupholders are paired up in each row and in the Highlander you get an extra sling space under the centre console, in addition to the door bins, which also hold bottles.

I speak to a lot of people about seven-seat SUVs for reasons that largely escape me (when I say I speak to them, what I mean is "try and talk them out of it if they don't need it") and one of the big issues that comes up is parking.

The Santa Fe is a sizable SUV.

Big SUVs are around five metres long and they're pretty wide. Car parks are a nightmare for some people driving these things. The Highlander (again, like its Kia sibling) has this extremely clever system of backing or nosing the car out of a tight spot with the remote. Once activated, you hold the backwards or forwards button on the remote and it will extract itself without hitting anything or anyone and, dead set, the looks of awe on unsuspecting people's faces are brilliant. 

The big rear doors make loading and unloading people from the back seats really easy, and the access to the third row is okay for kids.

Access to the second row is great thanks to the big rear doors.

The cabin is very thoughtfully designed and, as is Hyundai's new-found habit, it has a different dash and console design to the lower spec models. There's been a bit of a button explosion in here and they're all the same (somebody at Hyundai design HQ owns a Porsche, I think) but they're big and well-labelled, so they should be easy to get the hang of.

The 2021 Santa Fe scored a few safety upgrades, which are always welcome. You get six airbags, ABS, stability and traction controls, forward AEB (10-65km/h for pedestrians and cyclists, 75km/h for cars), turn assist (tries to stop you crashing into oncoming traffic in a right-turn situation), rear cross traffic alert, rear AEB, lane keep assist and blind spot monitoring.

The digital dash includes Hyundai's Blind Spot Monitor, which projects a view into the dashboard from a camera pointed down the side of the car. A camera on either side activates according to the indicator direction. It's like Honda's LaneWatch, but on both sides and without blinding you at night. It's very handy.

You also get two ISOFIX points and three top-tether mounts in the middle row.

The Santa Fe's curtain airbags do not properly reach all the way to the third row, meaning those back there are at a slightly higher risk in a side impact, a failing the Santa Fe shares with the Sorento.

This version of the Santa Fe has not been tested, so the five star ANCAP rating carries over from 2018.

No matter which Santa Fe V6 you buy, servicing comes in at $399 per service for the first five services and you need to go back to the dealer every 12 months/15,000km. That's not bad (and Hyundai has lifetime capped-price servicing) but it's more expensive than the admittedly much barer Toyota Kluger. The Mazda CX-9 I had the week before can only cover 10,000km between services and costs an average $100 more per visit.

The kicker on the V6 petrol is the fuel use. While the price gap between the petrol and diesel widens when you take into account servicing, the petrol uses a lot more fuel to cover the same amount of ground. I had the Santa Fe for a wet week and in a committed combined cycle approach (half city, half highway), I couldn't do better than an indicated 11.7L/100km. A similar week in the diesel delivered 7.8L/100km. The petrol's official figure is 10.5L/100km, so at least Hyundai continues to deliver reasonably accurate official testing.

On my figures, the range from the 67 litre tank will be about 570km between fills.