The 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz Looks Really Sharp\u2014and Small

The coming Hyundai Santa Cruz is not a pickup truck, even though it has pickup truck proportions and sports a pickup truck bed. Hyundai insists that you call it Sport Adventure Vehicle.

Here we see it for the first time in full production trim, same as you will see it in Hyundai dealer showrooms this summer. I saw it myself with my own eyeballs and I can say it looks every bit as swoopy and artistically svelte in the metal as it did in the spy photos and in camouflage. Indeed, it may be the most handsome pickup truck on the market today. Except, of course, that it is not a pickup truck but a Sport Adventure Vehicle.

The idea is that all those beautiful active young people in the ads and in the video Hyundai showed us just before the unveiling want a vehicle that allows them to stow wet wetsuits and stinky, sweaty climbing gear under the secure roll-top of the bed. Hey, if they want a secure place to store stuff, why not just get a Tucson? The Santa Cruz is based on the Tucson, after all. The interior from the dashboard to the B-Pillar is all Tucson, and that is nothing but secure storage.

One problem buyers may foresee with the Santa Cruz is that the bed is too small. The bed is four and a half feet long and four feet wide. The whole Santa Cruz is smaller in every dimension than the Toyota Tacoma, Honda Ridgeline, and Nissan Frontier, for instance. Indeed, you’d have to go all the way back to the 2003-2006 Subaru Baja to find something similarly proportioned. The Baja, of which only 30,000 were ever sold in its four long years of production, had almost the exact same-sized bed. Remember the Lincoln Blackwood? That was similar in terms of usability of the bed, if on a slightly larger scale. If the purpose of the roll-top bed with underfloor storage is for “smelly items,” as senior chief designer Christopher Chapman said, then why not just get a really good plastic storage bin with a really good lid and then buy yourself a Tucson?

It may be one of life’s great mysteries.

Otherwise, the Santa Cruz benefits from all of the coming Tucson’s mechanical bits and pieces. It rides on the unibody of the Tucson crossover, with the bed an integral part of the structure. It’s powered by your choice of two engines: a 2.5-liter direct-injected inline-four that should make 190 hp and 180 lb-ft of torque; and a 2.5-liter DI turbocharged inline-four making an estimated 275-plus hp and over 310 lb-ft of torque. Both are mated to an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic.

Both trims get Hyundai’s Advanced HTRAC AWD. Different drive modes result in different drive experiences. The Sport setting, for example, results in more torque being routed to the rear wheels. The Santa Cruz also offers 3,500 pounds of towing capacity for the naturally aspirated 2.5 and 5,000 pounds for the turbo model.

Electronic safety aids include: forward collision-avoidance assist that offers emergency braking when a collision with anything from a stopped car to a slow cyclist is detected; blind-spot collision avoidance assist does the same thing for whatever is lurking behind those large sail planes of the C-pillars; and there is the by-now-usual features of rear cross-traffic collision avoidance; lane-keeping assist; and surround view monitor, to name just some of the safety features now demanded by buyers on almost any vehicle.

The Santa Cruz is certainly lovely to look at, and that will count for a lot. The only question remains how much practicality buyers will want from that abbreviated bed.

What say you? We hear from readers and potential shoppers all the time about their desire for truly compact pickup options. Does the Hyundai Santa Cruz fit the bill? Or does it look too small? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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