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.

Month 1:  

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.