Jaunty from some angles, menacing from others, the bold lighting signature and muscular, trapezoidal shapes of the 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz look like no other pickup truck. While it can do most of the things that small truck buyers expect, the Santa Cruz neither looks nor drives like a normal truck. The Hyundai has the smallest bed and is a little short on weight capacity, but it will tow as much as the Honda (up to 5,000 pounds) and offers lots of clever features, including a scaled-down version of the Ridgeline’s locking in-bed trunk and a locking rollback tonneau cover. The Santa Cruz is the smallest of this trio and the most unconventional, but offers many pleasant surprises. This is why, like the Ridgeline, both come only as crew cabs. Unlike Marty McFly’s old Toyota, both are based on front-wheel drive crossovers and meant to be comfortable, practical family machines as much as workhorses. At just under 200 inches long, the pair are the first proper compact trucks to hit the streets in nearly two decades.
The Santa Cruz, and the similarly all-new Ford Maverick, take this format and scale it down a size. If the Santa Cruz’s unibody, crossover-based pickup recipe seems familiar, it’s because Honda has been building a midsize truck like this since 2005, the Ridgeline. The Santa Cruz stretches the Tucson’s platform and adds a versatile 52.1-inch cargo box but retains its classy interior, and responsive driving dynamics. This should come as no surprise because ahead of the B-pillar, the Santa Cruz is much the same as Hyundai’s Tucson, itself a slick and highly refined crossover that sports a bold new design for 2022. The 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz is the Korean automaker’s first pickup truck and a startlingly sophisticated, civilized take on the genre.
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