Hyundai Santa Cruz Pickup Still Two Years From Showrooms

Speed is not of the essence when it comes to the Hyundai Santa Cruz crossover pickup.

The lifestyle truck will not go into production this year or next year, confirmed Brian Smith, chief operating officer of Hyundai Motor America.

“We love it,” he said of the four-door Santa Cruz that seats five and would be based on the Tucson compact crossover. “We talk about it a lot.”

The Santa Cruz is targeted at car and crossover buyers who want a car-like ride and fuel efficiency but like the added utility of having a pickup bed.

But getting it from concept to showroom is proving painfully slow, and the automaker is missing heady days for truck and SUV sales in North America.

Hyundai showed a concept of the “crossover truck” at the 2015 North American International Auto Show and it garnered enough positive feedback to act on. Then-CEO Dave Zuchowski pushed hard for it to be added to the brand’s car-heavy portfolio, and in late 2016 the decision had been made to greenlight the project to arrive in 2018 as a 2019 model. An announcement was coming soon, Zuchowski said.

Then things fell apart. Its champion was lost and the plan stalled. Ironically it was Hyundai’s preponderance of cars, which dragged down Hyundai sales in the U.S. which led to Zuchowski being replaced as CEO.

It took until 2017 to confirm the board had given its approval to proceed. And now we are looking at 2020 to see it in showrooms.

“We have a lot of product development going on,” said Smith. “We need to prioritize.”

We don’t have any updates on how the look has evolved since the 2015 concept nor do we expect the Santa Cruz to have the diesel engine that was in the concept –which was unveiled before the VW diesel emissions scandal was uncovered.

Meanwhile the Honda Ridgeline, now in its second generation after a two-year hiatus, is seeing sales down almost 30 percent through the first three months of the year. And similar past experiments such as the Subaru Brat and Baja remain defunct.

Hyundai’s early studies suggested the automaker could sell at least 50,000 units a year while other research suggested it could be as high as 70,000, a figure that Zuchowski said was viable at the time.

Regular body-on-frame compact pickups have seen a resurgence in the U.S., spurred by GM’s Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon. Ford is bringing the Ranger back to the U.S. market and FCA has a Jeep Wrangler pickup in the pipeline.

At the 2018 New York auto show, Hyundai executives confirmed plans for eight new or updated SUVs by 2020 including the fourth-generation Santa Fe midsize crossover that goes on sale this summer alongside the stretched three-row Santa Fe XL. The Kona, including an electric version, is a new nameplate for the crossover lineup and a redesigned Tucson is expected in 2020.

Hyundai is far from the only automaker to have dreamed up a crossover-based pickup. Honda of course has the Ridgeline that’s closely related to the Pilot, and at the New York show, Volkswagen unveiled the Atlas Tanoak concept, a truck built on the same MQB platform as the three-row Atlas crossover. Just as Hyundai did at the 2015 Detroit show, Volkswagen is testing the waters to see if there’d be enough interest in a pickup variant of the Atlas.

 

 

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