Hyundai Tucson Elite N Line Hybrid long term review

It was a simple and obvious ploy, really. When the sharply styled Hyundai Tucson’s MY25 update arrived in the middle of 2024, diesels were gone and a new turbo hybrid powertrain had lobbed up and down the lineup.

Why? Because it’s a formula that’s worked so very very well for Toyota RAV4, habitually the biggest-selling passenger car in Oz of late. And that’s precisely what Hyundai wants to ape with its own midsize SUV contender.

It’s not an exact facsimile: Tucson can be had as a naturally aspirated 2.0L front-driver, a turbo 1.6 in either front- or all-wheel drive, or turbo 1.6 hybrid in FWD and AWD.

Add base, mid-spec Elite and flagship Premium guises, and you’re spoilt for choice. And you can have any of the five available powertrains in the Elite trim. With or without sporty N Line accoutrement. Gotta love choice.

So which variant did Chasing Cars go for? And what are we planning on doing with it?

Navigate this long-term Hyundai Tucson Elite N Line Hybrid review

• • Month 1: Taking delivery of the Tucson
  • Month 2: What’s Olek’s is mine
  • Month 3: Taking on RAV4
  • Month 4: Ghost in the tailgate
  • Month 5: The power and the passion
  • Month 6: the final verdict

Month 6: the final verdict

Final thoughts and a surprise price drop

With Ari’s angular bonce aimed towards Hyundai HQ on The Final Day of sixth months roughly 10,000 extra kays under its tyres, it’s time to compare against crucial benchmarks.

Against Toyota RAV4? It was a fairly easy win for the Tucson in most regards, and highlights that the world is starting to really want for a next-generation midsize SUV from Toyota, regardless that, considering the RAV4’s unwavering popularity, it doesn’t really need one.

Then there’s a comparison closer to home: Santa Fe. And it’s a very well regarded and critically praised large Hyundai at that.

And yet we’re strongly inclined to think that if you don’t really need seven-seats, the Tucson is a better choice. It’s more frugal. It’s quicker. It’s more fun to drive. And it’s more affordable, even before Hyundai Australia went and chopped the pricing of the Tucson range top to bottom…

What? Indeed. In early April, Hyundai gave the Tucson a significant haircut across the lineup. And you don’t need to read between the lines that it’s a ploy to try to steal some added market share from Toyota in this midsize segment.

So Ari arrived in the Chasing Cars garage as a $52,600 proposition, or $57,606 on the road in NSW. And it leaves Chasing Cars’ custodianship with the same list price, but at $54,490 driveaway. Or over $3000 more affordable.

And as the third runner in a string of hybrid SUVs in your author’s custodianship, including ‘Chief’ the ($107K) Lexus RX350h Luxury and ‘Fred’ the ($60K) Honda CR-V e-HEV RS, we’re included to rate Ari the Tucson as the critical best of the trio.

If you’re shopping for a petrol-electric five-seat family hauler with real depth in quality – at any price – our advice is to stick the Tucson up high on your short list, and cherrypick the trim, powertrain and spec to taste and budget. You could do much much worse.

Month 5: The power and the passion

Powertrain, chassis, N Line…three big ticks

Five months in and on the home straight, and I’d begun to forget just how handy the Tucson’s turbo-hybrid powertrain is. Or, more accurately, how good the turbo-hybrid Tucson is…because there is a difference.

Yup, the turbo 1.6L petrol-electric creams Toyota’s 2.5L NA-based tech on performance and drivability, especially paired with Hyundai’s mostly handy torque converter auto. Even if its mid-fives fuel consumption – even on cheapy 91RON or E10 – isn’t as thrifty as a front-drive RAV4.

But it was a steer in the highly regarded big brother Santa Fe seven-seater that rammed home how nice the Hyundai hybrid is…in the smaller, lighter mid-size Tucson.

Should it surprise anyone that the Smartstream G1.6T-GDi HEV powertrain in Santa Fe is identical to Tucson, from compression through to transmission ratios?

The only on paper difference, it seems, is that the large SUV’s (3.51:1) final drive is shorter than the midsizer’s (3.32:1) to, perhaps, aid off-the-mark acceleration.

And yet it doesn’t. Jumping back into the Tucson after a week in the Santa Fe, I really notice the difference that shedding 300kg of ballast makes to the mid-sizer, be it off-the-mark or in rolling response. The Tucson feels gym-fit, the Santa Fe a bit lardy and ponderous in comparison.

I’m also reminded just how athletic the Tucson is on its N Line-spec 19s and how, despite the lower-profile rolling stock, the ride quality remains compliant and peachy despite the handling package’s crisp dynamic edge and solid body control.

Add the excellent pews I’ve banged on about since Ari’s first review instalment, and it’s a pretty easy recommendation: Tucson is great, if best served with the hybrid powertrain and N-Line as (near) essential boxes to tick.

All-wheel drive? Frankly, I haven’t missed any rear axle torque and front-drive, for my personal purposes, is perfectly fine. And the $2500 saving from sticking with a bum-dragger is money better spent elsewhere.

Month 4: Ghost in the tailgate

Is Ari the Tucson possessed? Or is it simply user error?

There’s a ghost in the Tucson’s tailgate. And it’s out for destruction.

It took four months into the six-month loan for Ari’s powered tailgate to whack itself into the storage cage gate perched just behind its parking spot.

I was standing by the passenger-side taillight of the locked Hyundai, that had been sitting dormant overnight, when it started beeping, flashing and then…bang…tailgate straight into the solid landscape.

There’s a tailgate remote button on the keyfob, which was untouched and in my pocket, and I immediately presumed user error. Somehow. After checking for missing paint on the tailgate lip – nope – it was off to whatever adventure I’d had originally planned.

Next day, same thing. Beeping, flashing, a bit of whacking… What was going on?

I called Hyundai HQ, dropping by for a check up, and Ari returned…with its tailgate power deactivated. Not ideal, really, given the resistance in the powered tailgate struts require a bit of shoving to make the door move in either direction.

It was only when a Chasing Cars colleague took Ari for a road trip, noticed the issue, then reactivated the tailgate power in the media submenu system. And it went self-whacking once again…

So our Elite (and higher-spec Premium) variants get Hyundai’s “Smart Power Tailgate” with “hands-free opening”, which is usually paired with a kick sensor under the vehicle’s rear bar. So the ‘ghost’, I’d figured, was a kick-sensor mechanism that somehow became faulty.

But no. After consulting Google I arrived at a YouTube video, produced by Hyundai USA, about the ins and outs of the brand’s “Smart Liftgate”. All 4 minutes and 37 seconds of it. That’s right, the tailgate has its own how-to video that’s almost five minutes long…

Unsurprisingly, the Most Viewed section of the narrative is the bit that explains that when you’re anywhere within one metre of the rear bar with the key in your pocket, the tailgate will open automatically if set, by submenus, just so.

But there are rules. The car must be locked, and more than three minutes must have passed since locking.

Yes, it’s an esoteric convenience of sorts for those times when your hands are full of stuff and you’re steady enough to two feet to activate a kick sensor. But if you’re simply walking by the rear of the car, it’ll open unwarranted. Lesson learnt…

It’s a big boot. A generous 582L as a five-seater, and a whopping 1903L as a two-seater.

The mid-size Tucson proves the perfect size for adults and big kids who enjoy cycling.

Why? Because you can fit a large bike, even a 29-inch mountain bike, in the cargo area (and here’s the important bit) without having to start removing bicycle wheels, which is the mutha of all inconvenient chores when you’re hitting multiple trails, pump tracks or skateparks.

I know a lot of adult cyclists and most of them have the delusion that (specifically) a Volkswagen T-Roc will fit their pushie-loving needs. Nope. Not even close. Or at least, not even without whipping off wheels and a whole lot of swearing.

As I also discovered, after some minor miscalculation with the size of a packaged booze cabinet, the Tucson will fit some fairly large furniture boxes in its tail, too, if you want to skip a retailer’s $150 delivery fee – that might otherwise go to the Aperol and Campari fund – and decide to pick stuff up from the factory warehouse yourself.

Practical and well packaged? You bet.

Month 3: Taking on RAV4

How the presence of the most popular passenger car in Australia sheds clear light on the virtues of the Tucson we’ve nicknamed Ari.

I was right about the powertrain. But I was wrong about the interior.

As Month Three rolled around, I’d not realised how far beyond those New Car Sensations – those that inform critical assessment – I’d ventured with Ari the Tucson. Because I’d forgotten how quickly I’d settled into the midsize SUV’s manners and ways.

I’d even begrudgingly accepted its clumsy start-up rigmarole as something approaching normal. And started to notice that, on any given day, I’d favour taking Ari home over almost anything else available to me in the Chasing Cars garage.

I’d become so acclimatised to what would be a rapidly-normalised Tucson hybrid experience that I was honestly taken aback by the praise that other Chasing Cars crew would heap on the front-driven N Line once they’d taken it for a steer. I clearly wasn’t sharing their enthusiasm – to the powertrain, to the cabin – though not because of any personal gripes.

Then the Toyota RAV4 2WD Cruiser (finally) rolled into the CC garage for a no-brainer video twin test and the pennies started to drop hard.

Regularly the biggest-selling passenger car – and sometimes, supply permitting, the biggest selling anything – in Australia, the RAV4 continues to be an amazing success for Toyota some seven years after its global launch. And this where Hyundai wants its Tucson to be.

Korea wants a big slice of this segment’s market share and, on paper, its midsize SUV seems to offer a lot of the right stuff.

But it’s only really in a back-to-back comparison with Japan’s edgy-styled cash cow that it becomes clear just how critically superior the Tucson is in so many crucial areas.

You can watch the indepth blow by blow between Tucson and RAV4 on our YouTube channel, but here’s the abridged version focussing on areas of the Hyundai I’d perhaps started to take too much for granted, or neglected, for no other reason than I’d become too familiar with it.

The Tucson cabin design has a simple, straightforward, unfussed clarity that both a) makes it so easy to negotiate the user interface and b) makes it feel roomier and airier than perhaps actually is. It’s so welcoming, in fact, that I’d begun not to notice…

The N Line seats are fantastic, too. And go a long way into making that $2500 N Line premium something of a must-have. I’d been graced with excellent pews in my old Lexus RX (Chief) and Honda CR-V RS (Fred) long-termers, and Ari’s faux-suede and leather-blended sports buckets are equally form fitting and comfy.

There’s also elegant simplicity. I do love the 6.6-inch HVAC panel making climate control adjustment a breeze, though it can be tough to read in low light.

And I’m not sure what legal grey area the horizontal inductive charge pad is negotiating, but having my phone sat flat, face up, directly in sight is quite, erm, convenient at times.

But what this comparison really drove home is that the fussy, puffy, angular and slightly claustrophobic RAV4 cabin is, in 2025, really outliving its used-by date…almost in defiance given how damn popular the Toyota option remains to be. Because the Tucson format is simply so much better.

Then there’s row two. As embarrassing as it is to admit, it took three months for me to spend any time in the Tucson’s second row. But when it came time to take note – in the presence of the RAV4 – it really rammed home just how much larger and commodious the Hyundai is.

Further, the rear bench is superbly formed for long-haul comfort, feels even airier than the first row in ambience, and offers excellent, unfettered outward visibility for rear passengers.

Neighbours, friends, family and whomever would occupy row two would regularly heap praise, if clearly to the deaf ears of the driver…

The Tucson cabin’s not perfect. The twist dial mounted to the steering column for transmission selection, designed seemingly to free up the handy and usable space around the centre console, is easy to learn if tricky to master. Unless you’ve got the brake pedal jammed on, it’s really easy to grab neutral in a three-point turn. Annoying.

More concerningly, I have managed to bump it with my knee once or twice on the move, knocking the Tucson into neutral…somewhere about 60 or 70km/h.

Thankfully I’ve learnt that the Tuscon will blissfully sail on until the driver gives the dial a twist to revert drive back to ‘D’ without so much as a mild audible reprimand.

The quality of the accommodation really becomes apparent during my regular circa-nine-hour jaunts from Sydney to country Victoria and back to visit family, a round trip performed twice in the first couple of months of custodianship.

Is it any wonder that anatomically sound sports seats also offer excellent long-haul comfort purely through clarity of design?

Month 2: What’s Olek’s is mine

After a false start, it was Take Two with our long-term Tucson and some clear initial impressions sink in during the first real month of Dep Ed Dupriez’ custodianship.

Why long termers? Well, our usual week-long press car loans allow Chasing Cars to assess the right rig for you. But with long-termers – as brief as three months, as lengthy as six – we’re out to see if the car is right for us. It gets personal.

By the end of the tenure, a real-world ownership simulation, we’ll ultimately decide if we’d like to keep the vehicle indefinitely (hypothetically speaking), or we’re glad to be rid of it.

Ari is a chance for a personal hybrid SUV trifecta. My old Lexus RX 350h Luxury long-termer ‘Chief’ was a keeper. Ditto the Honda CR-V e-HEV RS I called ‘Fred’. Now it’s Ari’s turn in the Dupriez stable, even if it almost wasn’t…

Olek Novak. Remember him? The former Chasing Cars staffer was the original custodian of this very Tucson before young Novak pulled stumps to pursue a career path rumoured to centre on non-automotive, adult-oriented media. Whatever the truth, as Novak’s manager, I got to keep his stuff… At least, that is, the nice stuff.

First impressions of Olek’s hand-me-down came thick and fast.

My, what a (mostly) slick power this Smartstream G1.6 T-GDi Hybrid system is.

The gut feel is that it smokes Toyota’s natural aspiration-based powertrain in RAV4 for noise and refinement, particularly when passing the drive baton back and forth between internal combustion and electric drive, or a combination of both.

We’ll see when (hopefully) a RAV4 Cruiser fronts up for a one-on-one comparison.

What’s absent from our specification is the HTRAC active on-demand all-wheel drive. It’s a real shame, this, because hybrid AWD makes the Tucson more closely aligned to its Toyota nemesis than the Kia alternative offered by Hyundai’s corporate cousin, because the Sportage challenger is front-drive only.

Other initial impressions? The Tucson looks great, especially in what’s ostensibly $2500 optional N Line garb: larger 19-inch wheels, no gaudy grey plastic wheel arches. It’s a handsome jigger, even in plain old white paintwork.

I’m initially less jazzed with the cabin. Again, it packed high impact at launch, and it certainly liberally robs the slickness – and EV-ness at that – from electric stablemates such as the Ioniq stuff. In an ICE-based platform, the electro-varnish feels like a bit of a ruse…

At low speed, with its ominous whirling noise during low-speed fully-electric maneuvering, it certainly sounds like a pukka EV.

But even in the early days of settling into the rather excellent N Line sport bucket seats, I’m not convinced the Tucson is punching above its weight in the premium stakes.

Despite the swanky dual 12.3-inch screens, the hip rotary transmission selector and other flashiness, the material choice and execution just about meets reasonable expectations for a $57K on-road proposition, though it doesn’t really exceed them.

But it’s really the ‘driver annoyance systems’, and specifically the tiresome rigmorale of switching them all off every single time Ari restarts, that gets my goat from day one.

Yes, car scribes bang on about this stuff incessantly. And will continue to do so until these ‘issues’ are fixed or corrected. That said, I quickly learnt that, in my household, I’m far more patient and diligent dealing with these electro whims than my better half is.

Start-up. Wait. Star button. ‘Off’ in the media screen submenu. Main menu button. CarPlay button. Spotify button. And then hold the lane departure button (on the wheel) down for four seconds to turn <that second> system off, too. Call it eight or 10 or 12 seconds. At every start-up.

If your phone dropped out of reception – such as the underground carpark both at home and at work – the phone doesn’t re-pair without digging into more submenus once reception returns. It won’t reboot the connection by itself. And it sometimes boots up the wrong phone if multiple devices are hooked on Bluetooth.

It will be interesting to see how far and hard the clumsy driver annoyance systems want to push my personal buttons as the kilometres start to relentlessly roll under Ari’s tyres in the months to come.

Month 1: Taking delivery of the Tucson

What is it? The newest member of the Chasing Cars long-termer garage sits smack bang in the middle of the Tucson grade hierarchy. Our White Cream finished example is (exhaustively) called the Hyundai Tucson Elite N Line 1.6T HEV 2WD…but at least we know what we’re getting into from the label on the tin.

What’s a Tucson? It’s Hyundai’s volume-selling midsize SUV, named after the town in Arizona, USA. It’s a running theme for the South Korean brand whose portfolio also includes the Santa Fe (New Mexico), the Palisade (California), the Santa Cruz (also California) and the Kona (Hawaii).

Google reveals an ‘I-30’ highway running through Texas, which is a long bow to draw, and Venue is (sadly) the name of an inactive township in regional Arkansas, perhaps purely coincidentally…

We were going to nickname our Tucson ‘Olek’, in homage to the now inactive Chasing Cars staff member Olek Novak who’s shuffled off to greener pastures. Until Novak exited stage left, this was his long-termer, but what was his is now ours, with a nickname Ari…a tip of the Stetson to geographical origins as outlined above.

How much is it? At the time of acquisition, Ari lobbed into the Chasing Cars garage at $52,600 list, or $57,606 on road in NSW.

There are nine different configurations of Elite available in the Tucson stable depending on powertrain and N-Line fitment, ranging from $44,100 (2.0L FWD) to $55,100 (HEV AWD N Line), while the range itself starts from $39,100 at its cheapest to $61,100 for the all-you-can eat Premium HEV AWD N Line).

Options? Given there are so many off-the-rack variants offered, extra splurges are limited to premium ($595) or matte effect ($1000) paintwork and two-tone interior trim ($295) for Premium grade examples without N Line.

Worth a look is to bundle in the five-year/50,000km servicing pack ($1990) up front at the time of purchase.

What’s the spec of our car? Mid-grade Elite takes the 12.3-inch media, 18-inch wheels and LED exterior light fitout of the base Tucson and adds niceties such as leather appointment, powered driver’s seat, front seat heating, a powered tailgate and rain sensing wipers.

Stump for the N Line option and the driver’s screen graduates from 4.4-inch to 12.3 inches, while elsewhere it scores 19-inch wheels, suede-leather appointments, extra body colour-coding, and projector LED headlights.

The 1.6-litre turbocharged four-pot petrol in the Tucson lineup outputs 172kW and 264Nm. Stumping for the ‘HEV’ hybrid system adds a further 37kW and another 264Nm via a single electric motor.

Combined total system outputs are 172kW and 367Nm regardless of whether it’s front- or all-wheel drive, backed by a six-speed automatic transmission either way.

How long is it sticking around for? Six months and (hopefully) for 10,000kms.

What are we going to do with it? The usual Aussie family business for an unorthodox Aussie family unit. With three offspring spread up and down the east coast – Brissie and Gold Coast in Queensland, Bendigo in regional Victoria – there’s almost 2000 kilometres of scope for fulsome family catch-ups. There’s a lot of road tripping due.

Between long highway stints, it’ll mostly be daily urban duties. Given Ari is front-driver rather than the slightly pricier Tucson Elite alternative, there’s not much contextual call for anything tougher than mild soft-roading.

Given Hyundai’s main game is to take on Toyota RAV4, we’re pulling strings to line up a 2WD Cruiser to see how the updated Korean challenger takes on Australia’s best selling passenger car on level pegging.

Initial performance figures? We’ve yet to let Ari rip down the Chasing Cars test track but, consumption wise, Hyundai claims 5.3L/100km combined, with a RAV4-challenging 3.6L urban figure and a fairly lazy 6.5L for the open road.

Interesting, they’re the same claims be it the as-tested front-driven or (60kg heavier) all-wheel-driven format. Hmm…