2024 Hyundai Santa Fe XRT First Drive Review: Sweet spot off the beaten path

Just like with so many recent Hyundais, the 2024 Santa Fe grabbed the car world's attention with its bold design. The midsize crossover jumped from a handsome-yet-generic shape to a crisply creased box, capitalizing on both the trend toward squared-off and off-road-oriented designs and Hyundai’s recent retro-futuristic motif. According to Kevin Kang, the head of Hyundai Design North America, the design and development process took place during the pandemic, and it quickly became apparent that customers were going to want something that looked, felt and was reasonably capable of getting them away from it all. To that end, it’s evident from early sketches that ruggedness was always a key focus. That led in part to the boxy shape, but it informed the desire to offer maximum space, again, as a necessity for getting away. Theoretically, you would need space for gear, supplies and possibly for sleeping in. Even in South Korea, car camping, or «chabak» in Korean, was becoming popular as the Santa Fe was developed.

While every version of the new Santa Fe benefits from the design team's focus on ruggedness and space, one trim inarguably represents the pinnacle of those ideas: the XRT. The trim made its debut on the previous Santa Fe, and has expanded to the Tucson, Santa Cruz and Palisade. While all of those were and are mostly appearance packages (the Palisade version is even called the “Urban” in Canada), the 2024 Hyundai Santa Fe XRT is more of the real deal. It gets an additional 1.3 inches of ground clearance for starters. An inch of that is from a suspension lift, while the rest comes from the larger 29.6-inch Continental TerrainContact all-terrain tires. That gives the XRT 8.3 inches of ground clearance, which is 0.2 more than the Honda Passport (including the TrailSport), 0.1 less than a standard Jeep Grand Cherokee, and 0.4 less than a standard Subaru Outback. It’s the same as the Honda Pilot TrailSport. The lift also improves approach, breakover and departure angles by 1.9, 2.1 and 1.5 degrees respectively compared to a regular, non-hybrid Santa Fe.

Design-wise, the XRT receives black badging all around, a unique blocky grille insert, XRT branded leatherette