The Hyundai HCD-15 Santa Cruz was just one of the major hits of the North American Global Auto Display back again in 2015. A yr later, the company promised that a creation edition was a make any difference of when, not if. Properly, it can be been 50 percent a 10 years given that then, but the Santa Cruz is finally occurring.

In advance of the Santa Cruz’s April 15 unveil, Hyundai has produced a movie from its design studio in California chatting about the new, nicely, not-truck. Of course, Hyundai is adamant that “it is not a truck,” as design and style manager of Hyundai North America Brad Arnold states in the video. “It truly is a Santa Cruz,” he concludes. So, um, it is a metropolis? A skateboard manufacturer? A faculty whose mascot is the banana slug?

Turns out, it was intended for the city initial and foremost. “It can be meant to prosper in dense urban environments, and the open up outdoor,” Arnold states, but the buy in this article appears important. According to spy pictures, it shares a ton with the Tucson, and no one would blunder that CUV for getting an off-roader.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYd42Qwlumc

The unibody architecture with a pickup bed is what Australians would phone a ute, but it is really also various than the design and style greatest embodied by the Chevy El Camino and Ford Ranchero. Those were small to the ground and had only a mattress for cargo. The Santa Cruz, nonetheless, will have “the two open and closed storage,” according to Arnold.

So it’s far more like a Ridgeline, then? Not quite, for the reason that if it is really based on a Tucson it will be one particular class smaller than Honda’s midsizer. Purpose-clever, it looks to fill the void remaining by the 2WD pickups of the 1970s and 80s, from organizations like Toyota, Datsun, Mitsubishi and Isuzu. Having said that, people ended up of entire body-on-frame construction, not unibody.

So possibly the Santa Cruz truly is in a class of its own. The Santa Cruz debuts April 15, and even if it’s been six many years given that the principle, at the very least Hyundai keeps its guarantees. Also, it really is not each individual day that you get to be in a phase of one. That is, till the 2022 Ford Maverick enters the industry.