The all-new Hyundai Santa Cruz pickup will officially debut on April 15, and this is what it looks like.
The original show car debuted at a show more than six years ago (see video). It was a unitized pickup truck with a Double cab, narrow rear doors and Santa Fe SUV underpinnings. The company then kept postponing the launch in favor of other, more promising models, and finally resolved to produce it in 2017 – albeit in a considerably different form.
The new Santa Cruz comes based on the latest Tucson platform, including the frame, the chassis and the front fascia. The cab has two rows of seats and two normally sized doors. A transversely mounted engine drives the front wheels by default, but a coupling on the rear axle provides on-demand AWD.
North America will be the main (and possibly the only) market for the Hyundai Santa Cruz, which lacks real competition there. The Chevrolet Colorado and the Ford Ranger are both big, serious, body-on-frame trucks, and the others are even larger than those two. The Korean carmaker calls its compact pickup an SAV, or Sport Adventure Vehicle.
The production will take place at the Alabama factory this summer, where the company already assembles the Tucson and Santa Fe SUVs alongside Elantra and Sonata sedans.
Last time Hyundai released a pickup was in 1976–1990, and it was essentially a ute converted from a RWD car named Pony. Kia used to build three-wheeled mini-trucks licensed from Mazda back in the time.