Twenty-Five Years of the Hyundai Santa Fe
A few days ago, we brought you a roundup of the Toyota RAV4 since its inception, spurred by the release of a shiny new iteration for the 2026 model year. This got our thinking cap in gear, prompting a similar exam of the Hyundai Santa Fe.
Why the Santa Fe? Two reasons. First, it hews to the Hyundai philosophy of wildly changing the appearance of a vehicle model during its leaps to a new generation. A rep from the brand once told this author that sort of thinking is part and parcel of the Korean ethos; if a vehicle is going to be redesigned, they explained, most customers in its home market want something completely different than the old one.
[Images: Hyundai]
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The second reason? That’s related to the first and simply down to visuals. Hyundai’s media site makes it easy to paw through years of back catalogs, putting these photos right at an author’s fingertips. It helps that each iteration is, as mentioned, completely different from the one before.
And actually, there’s a third reason: the Santa Fe was Hyundai’s first foray into the then-burgeoning car-based crossover segment. With its reputation already set for providing immense value, it didn’t take long for the Santa Fe to start flying off dealer lots and become a familiar sight on the streets once it was introduced in the summer of 2000 as a 2001 model.
That version was available with a standard transmission for a spell, in case you’ve forgotten. They weren’t easy to find when new but this author did drive one back in the day and it was wholly appropriate for the job.
Front-wheel drive in that configuration and paired with a 2.4L four-banger making 149 horsepower, natch. A larger V6 was also available, displacing 2.7L and good for 181 ponies. Prices started at $17,199 or about $31,500 today.
In between we find the somnambulant second-gen which was typical of Hyundai in the mid- to late-2000s, though my opinion certainly didn’t blunt sales. The brand confused things a bit in the next generation, splitting the model into Santa Fe Sport (two-row) and Santa Fe XL (stretched three-row).
You can imagine the conversation at dealers. “We have an XL for you,” says one. “But we stopped selling the Excel years ago,” raged another. “No! XL!” And so forth in a perpetual who’s-on-first hilarity. Luckily, it wised up.
These days, the Santa Fe is a squared-off Land Rover for the masses, handsome and available with either an internal combustion engine (277 hp / 311 tq) or a hybrid powertrain (231 hp / 271 tq).
Prices start at $34,800 for a front-drive base trim, proving it’s not all that far off the original model some 25 years ago in terms of adjusted price. Given the extra safety gear and far better tech, it’s something of a comparative bargain.
