Hyundai HCD-15 Santa Cruz

Hyundai Santa Cruz Crossover Truck Concept Aimed at Urban Millennials
Turbodiesel Trucklet Targets “Urban Adventurers”

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Hyundai and Kia are well-established players in the compact and midsize sedan markets and have found modest success in crossovers. The one segment the Koreans haven’t yet entered is pickup trucks. Perhaps discouraged by the relatively incremental sales of the Japanese in the heavily domestic-dominated truck market, Seoul decided its efforts were better spent on hot-selling crossovers. However, the Hyundai Santa Cruz concept shows that the company has not totally abandoned all hopes of entering the truck market, depending on your definition.

The premise behind the Santa Cruz is that there’s an under-served group of buyers that want greater versatility and utility than offered by most crossovers but don’t have the need for the towing and payload capacity of a traditional pickup. Hyundai claims the Santa Cruz is ideally suited to the typical activities of Millennials, such as dropping off recyclables, loading up mountain bikes and hitting the trail, or going surfing, among other pursuits. To keep those dirty, sandy, or smelly items separate from the interior, the Santa Cruz’s cargo area is completely separate from the interior. However, to facilitate the loading and transport of longer, bulkier items, the Santa Cruz is equipped with a drawer-like slider to lengthen the available cargo space. An integrated retractable tonneau cover keeps items secure and out of view when parked.

The concept is a four-door, but the rear doors are rear-hinged doors typical of those found on extended-cab trucks. The Santa Cruz is billed as a five-passenger, but based on its size, we wouldn’t want to be stuck in the back for an hours-long road trip.

What’s most intriguing to us about the Santa Cruz concept is what’s under the hood. Hyundai specifies a 2.0L turbodiesel I-4 making 190 hp and 300 lb-ft of torque and capable of fuel economy in the “high 30 mpg” range. The power hits the pavement through Hyundai’s HTRAC all-wheel-drive system. The transmission type was not mentioned but figure it being a conventional torque-converter automatic or possibly Hyundai’s new dual-clutch transmission.

The Honda Ridgeline offered the premise of a unibody, crossover-based truck, on a somewhat larger scale and is currently a distant fifth in midsize truck sales. A new Ridgeline is coming within the next few years, with Honda convinced there’s a market for it. Although considerably smaller than the Ridgeline, the Santa Cruz shows Honda isn’t alone in its belief that there’s a market for non-traditional trucks.

Truck Trend

The Subaru Brat returns as a Hyundia Santa Cruz?

It would make a decent little grocery-getter. Just a concept though. Likely will never see the light of day.

Hyundai Santa Cruz Concept Picks Up Traction

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When Hyundai's adventurous little concept truck, the Santa Cruz, debuted at the 2015 North American International Auto Show, there was plenty of buzz about the possibility of a new vehicle straddling the fence between a traditional pickup truck and a midsize SUV.

According to the Detroit Free Press, Hyundai could be getting more serious about bringing this vehicle to market.

The idea of a segment-busting midsize pickup that has more in common with a car-based sport utility vehicle than anything else is not new. It's been seriously discussed by several truck and carmakers over the years. Remember the Dodge Rampage, Volkswagen AAC and Toyota A-BAT? But the timing was always a bit off.

With the strong resurgence of the pickup truck segment, there might be a place for a small-volume "hybrid" pickup for those who don't need all the capabilities of a traditional pickup but still want the handling dynamics of a car-based platform. After all, it wasn't that long ago when we had vehicles like the Subaru Baja, Ford Ranchero and Plymouth Scamp. And everyone knows how much the Australians love their utes.

Is it time for something like the Santa Cruz to test the waters for this segment? Our guess is as long as Hyundai doesn't need to sell a lot of them (it would have to exist on a flexible, shared platform) and it doesn't fool itself into thinking this will be its entrance into the sizable pickup market, then Hyundai will probably be just fine. But if it wants to catch the attention of potential truck folks looking for a creative solution to an unmet need, this probably won't be the vehicle that does the trick.

PickupTrucks.com

Hyundai Santa Cruz Pickup Will Reportedly Get Approved Soon

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The Hyundai Santa Cruz pickup concept unveiled at this year’s Detroit Auto Show may get the green light for production in the near future.

The chief executive of Hyundai Motor North America, Dave Zuchowski, said he is confident the study will get approval soon from the company’s headquarters in South Korea. “There is a very high probability we get the approval of the truck soon,” Zuchowski was quoted as saying by The Detroit Bureau.

According to the executive, more than 90 percent of the potential buyers the company has surveyed like the Santa Cruz concept.

“It’s proven very popular,” Zuchowski said. Considering that Hyundai’s top Korean executives believe that the key to future sales growth depends on expanding its SUV and truck line, the fact that people like the Santa Cruz is really good news.

The Hyundai Santa Cruz study distinguishes itself from pickups currently on sale thanks to its more car-like characteristics. It targets young, so-called “Urban Adventurers” who lead active lifestyles and need a space for tools or dirty sportswear and gear, rather than carrying them inside their car or crossover. The study even features a built-in cargo bed extender.

Along with the production version of the Santa Cruz, Hyundai may also add a new subcompact crossover to compete with models like the Chevrolet Trax and Jeep Renegade. In addition, Hyundai also plans to unveil a new version of the Elantra sedan at the LA Auto Show in November.

Note: Hyundai Santa Cruz pictured Above is a Carscoops rendering.

CarScoops

Hyundai Motor America CEO: Santa Cruz Pickup Expected To Be Green-Lighted

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Hyundai is in the midst of a major push to remind consumers that it does, in fact, build plenty of “trucks”—and by trucks we of course mean crossovers. With a production mix skewed strongly toward cars, Hyundai publicly acknowledges that it isn’t as well set-up as it’d like to be for the automotive industry’s largely truck- and crossover-driven sales rebound. Even so, the company just rolled out an agreeable new Tucson, which joins the also eminently agreeable Santa Fe and Santa Fe Sport crossovers. Will that be enough? Not according to Hyundai, from whom we learned that more so-called trucks are definitely in the works.

The good news, at least for crossover-weary enthusiasts out there, is that one of Hyundai’s proposed truck models is, in fact, a truck. Well, it’s sort of a truck; Hyundai likes to call it a utility vehicle, but you know it as the Santa Cruz, the Subaru Brat–like, compact, diesel-powered, neo-pickup that captured a lot of attention at this past year’s Detroit auto show. According to Hyundai Motor America’s CEO, Dave Zuchowski, the U.S. Hyundai team expects the Santa Cruz to be approved by the Korean mother ship this November. The overwhelmingly positive public reaction to the Santa Cruz helped Hyundai America build the case, and the automaker’s shifting of several manufacturing facilities from building cars to building crossovers (and additional factories sprouting up globally) will help carve out the necessary production capacity.

Car & Driver

I could picture people enjoying that but those fender/wheel wells are something else.