Hyundai Santa Fe review

The Santa Fe’s new interior is practical, spacious and airy. In fact, it’s excellent and one of the best at its price point for material quality, with comfortable seats and plenty of soft-touch materials.

The front cabin is characterised by its curved 12.3in digital instrument cluster and 12.3in infotainment touchscreen, both of which are crisp, clear and easy to use.

A control panel with buttons and touchpads sits below the touchscreen, connecting to a dual wireless phone charger. It’s an intuitive layout, with rotary climate control dials and customisable switches that allow quick and easy access to key vehicle functions.

Wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are also included as standard and are well integrated.

The passenger side of the dashboard houses a large storage compartment that, on top-rung cars, doubles as a UV-C sanitisation bay, which Hyundai says is the first fitted to a car. Throw in your phone, wallet or sunglasses, press a button and it cleanses your items of harmful bacteria in 10 minutes.

The Santa Fe can be ordered with five, six or seven seats, and the boot size varies depending on specification and powertrain. The seven-seat PHEV has 985 litres with its rearmost seats folded down (compared with 992 litres for the regular hybrid) or 621 litres with them in place. That’s pretty capacious in any case.

The seven-seat PHEV has plenty of space for passengers, who also enjoy ample seat adjustability. Both the rear and middle rows of seats can be folded completely flat, and if you’re carrying taller people in the back, more space can be created by sliding the middle row forward.

It’s otherwise not the roomiest third row – unlike the Land Rover Discovery’s, which is adult-appropriate – but it will be ideal for younger passengers.

Every seat has a USB-C charging port and two cupholders – handy touches for longer journeys.

Even further back in the boot are a mains voltage socket, rear climate control and one of the widest boot openings available today. Indeed, it’s so large that our 6ft 2in tester self spent a night sleeping in the rear of the car on top of a Welsh mountain in great comfort.

The boot is actually the lead for Hyundai’s marketing, and It’s the first time we can recall a car maker playing its new model’s most prominent asset as the width of its tailgate.

But that’s the pitch here: the Santa Fe is so useful you may not even need to put up a tent. On the outside upper flank behind the rear door there’s a panel not unlike the one on the Defender, only here it pops open as a grab handle so you can reach stuff on the roof rack.