Hyundai Santa Cruz Might Be Just Enough Truck

Whenever I praise any truck smaller than an F-450, the comments roll in. "The GMC Canyon would never work for me because I own a company that drags stuck bulldozers out of tar pits," one of them might say. Or "Honda engineers really whiffed with the Ridgeline because I have a team of Clydesdales that I trailer to my ranch at the top of Mount McKinley and it is unsuited to that use case." Or even "I need my truck to do sky wheelies in front of an arena audience to maximize my Monster Jam freestyle score, so therefore the 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz is a big no." That’s all fine. If your business is "Uber, but for bricks" or you regularly move lighthouses that are about to fall into the ocean or the Rubicon Trail is your driveway, then the Santa Cruz is not for you. But if you occasionally haul some pickup-truck things and maybe like to tow a medium-size boat, then it could work quite well. As long as you can sublimate your ego and admit that you don't really do anything that requires a Denis Leary voice-over.

If I told you Santa Cruz specs alone, you'd probably envision a traditional mid-size pickup truck. The one I tested makes 281 horsepower and 311 lb-ft of torque, has a 5000-pound tow rating, and can carry 1609 pounds of payload in its bed. Its EPA combined fuel economy: 22 mpg. Its tires are about 30 inches tall, and you can lock the center differential. To me, this reads as "Toyota Tacoma with somewhat better fuel economy." But that's not at all what the Alabama-built Santa Cruz looks like. It's a unibody, about as wide as a Tacoma but more than a foot shorter in length, with a roofline four inches lower. The Santa Cruz isn't trying to be tough or imposing. That alone is unusual. Even the Ridgeline has an HPD off-road version now.

But it turns out that towering braggadocio is not a prerequisite for usefulness. When I needed to fetch a vintage Tetris arcade game (I should not be allowed to look at Craigslist), I considered whether to take the Hyundai or my short-bed Ram. According to the measurements the seller provided, the game would fit in the Ram's bed with the tailgate open, without hanging over. In the Santa Cruz, it would hang off the tailgate to some degree, depending on how much the roll-up tonneau cover interfered (the housing eats up valuable bed space back by the cab even when the cover is retracted). I decided to go with the Santa Cruz, on the theory that its low tailgate would make loading the 300-pound game somewhat easier, and its independent rear suspension would provide a cushier ride for the 1980s electronics. As for the overhang, I fashioned a custom bed extender out of 2x4s to support the cabinet beyond the tailgate.

It turned out I didn't need it. The Tetris dimensions, pulled from the internet, were way wrong and the cabinet wasn't nearly as gigantic as I expected. So we didn't need the bed extender, but I was glad for the 31.6-inch tailgate height when it came time to play some real-life Tetris and lift the heavy game into the Santa Cruz bed. Were it not for the tonneau cover, the cabinet would have rested entirely on the tailgate. It hung over by perhaps six inches, nothing a few ratchet straps couldn’t address.