Some months after fascinating everyone with this crossover’s new generation, Hyundai now surprises the media once again by releasing the extended version of Santa Fe, whose name is expected to become “Grand” just like the French minivans Citroën C4 Picasso and Renault Scénic, and even the Brazilian sedan Fiat Siena. The Korean becomes very interesting because what may seem like only a long-wheelbase option actually has an entirely different proposal. This article will show how prepared it is to accomplish it.
As it was mentioned in the five-seat version’s article, these cars represent Hyundai’s “post-revolution” moment. After stabilishing the Fluidic Sculpture language with plenty of success, Santa Fe brings a much more elegant interpretation of what’s seen on Elantra, Veloster or even ix35. And since the automaker wants to give a higher-quality impression to the customers, it’s necessary to make bolder investments. North America seems to have started dropping the vans in favor of the bigger crossovers, maybe for their off-road abilities or even just to abandon the boring family-look for a subcategory which is starting to resemble tougher and “cooler” station wagons, like Ford Flex, Toyota Venza or VW’s future production version of CrossTourer concept, all of them with more than five seats. In Hyundai’s showroom, this category was supposed to be covered by Veracruz, but since it was received as nothing more than a bigger Santa Fe and ended up with bad sales, the automaker decided to take this reputation by the good side. They didn’t insist on using a new name and even avoided the other extreme of these possibilites, which would be only stretching Santa Fe Sport. Therefore, as in almost every decision in life, avoiding the extremes turns out to be the best option.
