Wed: Feb 14, 2007

I know that Dangerous Meta has linked to a New York Times review of the Hyundai Santa Fe but I actually had one this week in Detroit as my rental car from Hertz. Here's my mini-review: sucks in snow. We got about 4" of snow last night so I got to experience first-hand what this car handles like in the snow and the best description I can come up with is a slot car. Now this probably bears some explanation. What I noticed is that this car got pushed around quite a lot but only within the limits of the existing tire tracks. At one point I needed to change lanes to get around a guy who was making a left turn except the car was stuck in the existing tire tracks, I had the steering wheel turned at about 45 degrees and was still tracking straight, I could feel the wheels just spinning without traction.

Couple this poor snow handling with the fact the "traction control" flashes an amber "ESC" on the upper left of the instrument cluster and I was actually laughing with scorn while driving. Seeing that amber flash while the rest of the dash is lit up in blue made it stand out even more, and all I could think of when I saw it was "Escape! Escape! Escape!", obviously from the absuridity of the car. Oh, and their idea of "traction control" is to just cut the power to the wheels, both of them. If you get stuck in a snow bank good luck rocking it back and forth, I had the gas pedal floored at one point and it felt like I was in neutral, the drive wheels refused to do anything much less help me get out of the way and complete my turn...

Oh, and the styling makes me think "if a baby SUV had mated with a mini-van", and I don't mean that in a flattering way...


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