Yahoo Autos Moving in our long-term 2021 Hyundai Palisade | The box is a winner
Can you move in a three-row crossover or SUV without tearing the hair out of your scalp in frustration? That’s the question I recently tried to answer with our long-term 2021 Hyundai Palisade test vehicle.
Of course, most folks think of box trucks, vans or full-size pickups and trailers when the subject of moving comes around. We humans tend to accumulate a lot of stuff over the years, so moving all of it requires much more space than you might think you need. Our Palisade is big, but it’s not U-Haul box truck levels of big. It became clear right away that moving in a Palisade is a haul you chip away at bit by bit, just not in one fell swoop.
What we really have here is a luggage test on steroids. Instead of bags and suitcases, I loaded the Palisade up with items like a bed, mattress, dressers, an entertainment center and lots of boxes of personal belongings.
Let’s start with some dimensions and cargo figures. Cargo capacity behind the front row of seats measures out to 86.4 cubic-feet, which is the one number that matters in this context since I had the seats down 100% of the time for the move. That’s rather enormous, and we have the Palisade’s boxy shape to thank for it. There were several occasions throughout the move that the extra space afforded by this design came in handy, as it allows you to effectively stack items up all the way back to the liftgate without getting cut off (see below).
The most impressive item the Palisade fit is without a doubt a queen mattress. It required me moving the driver’s seat up about an inch further than I would have preferred, but that’s a small price to pay for fitting a whole mattress inside a car. For some perspective, a queen mattress is 80 inches long and 60 inches wide. It stretched the entire way front-to-back, but what actually caused a problem was the width. Apologies to Hyundai on this one, but the mattress did rip off one of the grocery hooks mounted just inside the hatch as we pried it out (you can see how snug it fits in the photo) of the car — fellow Palisade owners, watch your clearances, because those hooks are vulnerable.
