Hyundai Santa Fe Hybrid Calligraphy long term review

The latest addition to the Chasing Cars long term garage requires little rationalisation or justification. Hyundai’s Santa Fe large SUV was crowned our 2025 Car Of The Year.

And what better way to see whether it deserves our highest accolade – specifically, if its goodness and prowess in review maintains staying power in ownership – is to live with it for six months and 10,000 kilometres.

The stakes are unusually high for this long-termer. As is customary, the vehicle’s credentials and cracks come under particularly close scrutiny. But so does the Chasing Cars’ team assessment – were we right or wrong?

And it also brings focus on the business of media’s review craft – whether our short-term tests reflect the live-in experience – through the lens of a big-stakes Car Of The Year competition.

Specifically, through this mulit-part web review and through our YouTube channel, I’ll take the claims in our Car Of The Year winner narrative and seek to confirm or debunk them. What did we get right and what did we get wrong?

Pictured: our 2025 Car of the Year winner

Simple? Not exactly…

Formally, the Santa Fe range won the Chasing Cars’ 2025 COTY gong. We had three examples at our week-long shootout earlier this year, and none of them happened to be the Calligraphy Hybrid seven seater spec that has landed at CC HQ for the next six months…

In our COTY video extravaganza, judge Nathan Ponchard said the ‘COTY Calligraphy’s’ two-tone Forest Green interior was “just like a 1970s Italian supercar, while its six-seat format brought “a $150,000 SUV feel in a $75K Hyundai.” Perhaps.

Pictured: the base Santa Fe with the punchy 2.5T

However, our long-termer has a two-tone Pecan Brown ‘regular’ seven-seat arrangement…

Elsewhere in the COTY plaudits, editor Jez Spinks gushed that the newly introduced turbo 2.5-litre petrol powertrain is “so much better than the 3.5-litre V6 that it essentially replaces from the previous generation,” adding that it was “our favourite of the two [available] drivetrains.”

However, our long-termer is the 1.6T hybrid, AKA the <less favourable> of the two available Santa Fe powertrain options. Hmm. Still, Spink remarked that the hybrid’s “high-six-litre consumption” was “pretty amazing.” At least there’s that little nugget to put to the test…

Meanwhile, Chasing Cars founder Tom Baker said that “this is a family SUV you’d be proud to have in your garage or on your driveway,” though that was the base petrol variant.

“The Hyundai Santa Fe is one of those rare vehicles that doesn’t have a weak link in the range,” Spinks concluded at 2025 COTY, adding that “it’s almost faultless.”

We’ll see about that…over the next six months or so, in our Calligraphy Hybrid seven seater that clocks in at $76,500 before on-roads – plus $1000 for its a Earthy Brass Matte
paintwork – as priced at the kick-off of our long-term adventure.

Navigate this long-term Hyundai Santa Fe Hybrid Calligraphy review

• Month 1: The wrong Santa Fe?
• Month 2: A different kind of family hauling

Month 2: A different kind of family hauling

Family duties. At eleven tenths. Sideways.

Who knows what horrors ‘Santa’, our long-term plus-sized Hyundai, were subjected to in its first 15,000km of life before we took delivery of it? A stint as a furniture delivery van, perhaps?

From the get-go, Santa’s interior trim would squeak, somewhere in rows two and three. Not all of the time. Not loudly. But, still, it squeaks in a manner my old Tucson long-termer ‘Ari’ certainly didn’t.

Who was Santa’s former custodian for its first 15,000kms? Australia Post?

It could be design. The Santa Fe (clearly) has a boxy structure and lots of flat, square interior trim. Perhaps the flat union between all of it creates minute movement complete with, over time, squeaking as a result.

But I discovered a remedy of sorts in month two: race wheels. That is, when you drop rows two and three — liberating an advertised 1949 litres — six racecar wheels and tyres not only fit easily, they’ll squeak and squeal (as rubber rubs rubber) far louder than Hyundai’s cabin trim will.

Parent guides on bookshelves offer little guidance (one presumes) about times when your 14-year-old needs performance road rubber for his Holden VT Commodore at short notice and with limited budget. Such a glaring oversight, I know…

The issue here is obvious: he’s not legally old enough to work and therefore purchase said road rubber at his age.

The kid does khanacross with a CAMS-affiliated Victorian car club. As you can from 12 years and up. Long story short, he wrangled a VT Commo at 13, has spent 18 months learning to drive flat out and usually sideways on gravel — or an approximation of — and, suddenly, his first competitive tarmac even arrived with just a week’s notice.

Thing is, his Commodore fits all-terrain tyres. Partially because of the grip and traction advantage. But mostly because the surface at his home track of Bagshot in regional Victoria burns road-going rubber to the canvas quicker than you can say Bob Jane.

Three days out from the event, I narrowly avert the horrors of Facebook Marketplace for ‘cheap steelies’ when it transpires that Chasing Cars road test editor, John Law, has a stash of BMW wheels left over from his own car club pursuits, that just so happen to match the VT Holden’s wheel stud pattern and offset. Six of them. For free.

Two days out, and converted into a surrogate panel van, the Bimmer rolling stock is loaded into the back of Santa, with room to spare.

The next day, I hit the Hume south from Sydney on a nine-hour mercy run to regional Victoria, with fingers firmly crossed. A top-up in the hybrid offers almost 950-kilometres indicated per tank given it ticks along easily in the mid-sixes per hundred — on cheap E10, too — so no need to burn time with multiple fuel stops.

Light fading, the evening before the event, I arrive in Bendigo, junior and I unload the Bimmer wheels, sort them into pairs (according to tyre sizes available) and the kid mans the jack in the garage, swapping out all fours in what seems like under 30 minutes.

Miraculously, the wheels not only fit, there’s ample clearance all-round to the guards, given the car’s new 235mm front and 245mm rear tyre stagger. A quick tub at the local car wash and we head home to pack for a typical early-morning start for motorsport day.

Race day, junior’s first-ever crack on sealed asphalt at full noise, is a win — not so much by the stopwatch, but from the smoke he manages to peel off the rears. And that he’s kept his VT Commodore straight and out of the scenery while doing so.

Santa also proves very handy at the most obscure of family-oriented tasks: a motorsport support vehicle. It would be the last time the Hyundai would be called into play supporting a teen’s adrenaline-filled pursuits.

The wheels worked a treat, too. Thanks Johnny! We owe you one!

It’s on the nine-hour return trip to Sydney, free of squeaking tyres and the cabin settling into silence, that the Santa Fe’s driver annoyance…erm, I mean, ‘assistance’ systems begin to grate.

In short, the media system takes forever to load, causing a delay at every restart to defeat the overspeed warning system through the touchscreen.

Worse, the driver attention monitoring feature — which you can’t permanently switch off — bleats every time you go to change audio settings in the touchscreen or, incredulously, when watching the driver’s screen for too long…

…usually in search of why the car is bleating at you in the first place.

Why put fancy screens in a car when the vehicle itself reprimands you for daring to use them?

The adaptive cruise control is okay, if slow to adjust to changing conditions around the moving SUV. Ditto the lane centring system, which weaves around between the hotmix’s white lines like its pilot has had one too many long island ice teas.

Squeeze the throttle gently to accelerate under cruise control and Santa actually decelerates for some unknown reason…

These are no behaviours befitting our 2025 Car of the Year. And demand further investigation as our six-month custodianship rolls further on.

Month 1: The wrong Santa Fe? 

What ever happened to Arthur, our 2025 COTY-winning Calligraphy?

Be it fortune or fate and fair or foul, somehow, we ended up with the wrong Santa Fe.

The convenient narrative is that the Santa Fe collective – a base, an Elite, a Calligraphy – fronts up to 2025 Car Of Year, wins, and then Chasing Cars grabs one of the trio off the back of the event for six months of “did we get this verdict right?” assessment. But it didn’t pan out that way.

Here’s the truth. My old long-termer, the Hyundai Tucson called Ari, was due to return to Hyundai HQ in the weeks prior to our COTY event shenanigans.

What better send off than to use the Tucson as a support vehicle for the 50-strong-competitor, week-long interstate circus? Such events need extra workhorses to ferry crew and gear off camera.

In negotiating a delayed return, we’d lined up a replacement for the Tucson: an Earthy Brass Matte Calligraphy due as a direct swap literally days after our COTY finished.

Why? Because a step up to Hyundai’s large SUV from its well-regarded mid-sizer – both using the same 1.6T hybrid powertrain – would be an interesting comparison.

So a satin brown example of the Santa Fe hybrid was locked in for the Chasing Cars long-term fleet before it won Car Of The Year.

Of course, as the dust began to settle on the COTY verdict mid-event, a satin brown example of the Santa Fe hybrid was (partly) looking at taking out the overall win…and we put the obvious two and two together, didn’t we?

Our COTY winner one week would be the same vehicle to land in the Chasing Cars garage next, right? Right?

During event filming, we noticed something strange: our COTY Calligraphy had a huge dent in the roof.

Of course, you, the viewer, can’t see the damage…because we strategically shot around it to hide it. But, more concerningly, how the heck did <we> put a huge crease in the roof between the black roof rails…?

Fast forward one week and it’s time to swap our Tucson long-termer for our Santa Fe at Hyundai HQ who – at this stage of the proceedings – has no idea its large SUV has won Car Of The Year.

There it was, parked up, as clean as a whistle, the Earthy Brass Matte Calligraphy I’d already nicknamed Arthur in homage to Douglas Adam’s <The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy> main character, Arthur Dent (get it?).

I approach the vehicle. I check the roof. No dent. So no Arthur. Bugger.

Turns out Hyundai had a number of semi-gloss bronze Calligraphys on fleet. And had I paid closer attention, I’d already have clocked that our COTY car had a completely different Forest green six-pew interior, not the Pecan Brown seven-pew arrangement of our new – and yet nicknamed – long-term steed.

Pictured: Our Santa Fe with three-seats across the middle row, making this one a proper seven-seater

Also turns out Arthur’s dent wasn’t the fault of Chasing Cars. “Oh yeah, we did that,” explained Hyundai, without further explanation in clarifying when or how. Presumably our COTY was presently sitting somewhere at Hyundai Australia’s preferred body repairers…

So I nicknamed our Santa Fe ‘Santa’ – face-palmingly obvious, I know, but I’d already burned through a half-decent idea with Arthur and I was stumped for any alternative replacement.

Interestingly, Santa arrives with an unprecedented 15,000km already on the odometer, and some signs of wear and tear that we’ll get into in future report updates. That’s a pretty brave move by Hyundai, because we don’t plan on returning Santa until there’s 25,000km of total mileage under its tyres.

That’ll be about as fair a long-term assessment of Car Of The Year mettle as we could hope for.