I’m here, and in a Santa Cruz, because I’m looking for a better way to end the historic Route 66 driving tour, which runs from Chicago to Los Angeles, loosely following the passage taken by early pioneers travelling in search of a better life. I drove it a few years ago and enjoyed it but had wondered if there was a more interesting path from one side of the US to another, particularly as local enthusiasm for Route 66 feels like it wanes the further west you get: there’s a bit more going on than in America’s quiet middle, where the road is often the biggest show in town.
I’d been in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to preview the new Hyundai Santa Fe and interview its designer. So I picked up the Santa Cruz, and then picked up Route 66, just down the road in Albuquerque.
We don’t get the Santa Cruz in the UK, but it’s the car that Hyundai UK most gets asked about importing. I understand the appeal. Based on the Hyundai Tucson, it’s a good-looking lifestyle pick-up truck that is a smidge under 5m long, making it a compact truck in the US. It comes with a five-seat double cab and a relatively short, 1.3m load bay.
And a reputation for not being a ‘proper’ truck, at least in the eyes of those who like their pick-ups bigger, burlier and more separate of chassis and body.
The unitary-bodied Santa Cruz is a family-friendly alternative to an SUV, then, which would be considered perfectly capable if it ever arrived over here. In this upmarket spec, it has four-wheel drive, and a 2.5-litre turbo four-cylinder petrol engine making 281bhp and 311lb ft, which one American review says is “better suited to urban driving” than the non-turbo base model. Different world.
Anyway, it definitely feels more car-like than the brasher, more rugged and much, much larger trucks with which it shares the highway west out of Albuquerque. In large parts, the road that constituted historic Route 66 has been supplemented by four- or six-lane highway parallel to it, because after all there’s plenty of space to keep both.
