Is the Tucson all that much better than the Santa Fe ?

I thought the Tucson was smaller then the Sante Fe?

Briefly --

The SF is an older design than the Tuc (explains difference in JDPower ratings?) The Tuc has a little bit more legroom front and back than the SF The SF has more cargo space The Tuc has more airbags and a better crash rating than the SF The Tuc has active stability control (anti-rollover). SF does not. The Tuc gets slightly better MPG than SF (both with 2.7L V6) The Tuc is 7 in. shorter. A real plus if garage space is tight.

2006 is the last year for the SF. The '07 SF is a complete redesign and will be more upscale.

Since the 06 SF's are being phased out, Hyundai has a $3,000 incentive for July. Tucson's incentive is $1,000.

If safety is important to then the Tuc is the way to go. If not, and you want the absolute best bang for the buck, then the SF with $3000 off might be a better deal, although the stellar quality ratings for the Tuc is hard to pass up.

Thanks, This is very helpful and appreciated.

Peter

Just a couple of things to add: Bought an '06 Santa Fe in April of '06 Test drove the Santa Fe and the Tucson, a number of times. Both were Limiteds. The Tucson was (is) nice, however, there is a world of difference between the Tucson 2.7 and a Santa Fe

3.5. The 3.5 flies and the 2.7 has a problem in traffic on a busy interstate. Also there's a big difference between a 4 speed and a 5 speed.

In the end we went with the Santa Fe. My wife's major complaint with the Tucson was the pick-up. He next big complaint was the lack of a power seat. She's used to one and that killed the Tucson for her.

All in all the Santa Fe, in my opinion, is the nicer of the 2 cars. And I think it has a lot to do with the size of the Santa Fe. But, they are both really nice cars....we just happend to love the Santa Fe.

The Consumer Reports autos issue in April covered the results of their reliability poll. If memory serves me right, the Santa Fe was rated way above average in reliability. The Tucson was rated way below average. In fact, the Santa Fe is Hyundai's most reliable model, and the Tucson was Hyundai's least reliable model.

Take that bit of data however you like. Whatever problems people might have with CR as a magazine, the sheer size of their survey sample (1 mil+ vehicles) is hard to dismiss. Nothing I've heard so far challenges the statistical validity of their reliability survey.

Chris

The 2.7 needs about 10k miles to break in. The 3.5 is faster no doubt, but that 4 mpg hit was a bit excessive. We specifically bought a 03.0

2.7 LX for that reason - the 03.5 3.5's were on the lot, and the price increase was small, but the long term was going to be large.

Bah. Use the knobs! Personally I'm kicking around a seat replacement on mine. They just don't fit well.

I haven't been in a Tucson yet, but IMHO its sitting in a nasty market segment.. They're trying to compete with junk like the CRV and the RAV4 with the Sportage, and the Tucson is just a dressed up Sportage.

The 01-current Santa Fe fit a very good market segment. It had some design flaws (whoever designed the back seat fold-down setup needed a beating) but I've driven much much worse for a lot more money.

Unluckily they're trying to turn the Santa Fe into a chop-top minivan ("crossovers" suck!) and the Sportage/Tucson is a little too small for my taste, and Hyundai's dealer network is still pathetically under built, so I doubt I'll be going to Hyundai to buy another car anytime soon... :P

JS

I trust JD Power over Consumer Reports, primarily because Power gives out unfiltered consumer opinions, while CR "experts" distill their data and make their own recommendations. I prefer the unbiased scoop. Power retains PhD's in statistics to ensure sampling validity.

Also, the Power surveys are fresher and more timely than CR. I've noticed this over the years, Power always spots the new trends in quality first and CR lags. You're not going to get a good read on the '06's from CR until next year. Power's Initial Quality Survey tells you what new car owners think of their '06's today.

Power's recent results show that new Tucson owners are reporting fewer problems and higher satisfaction than new Santa Fe owners:

== USA TODAY == The Hyundai Tucson was the No. 1 compact multi-activity vehicle. Three Hyundai cars took second-place spots: the Elantra compact car, the Tiburon sporty car and the Azera large car.

Only the company's Santa Fe SUV, which is being redesigned for the 2007 model year, and the Accent subcompact car did not make the top three slots in their respective categories.

Yes and no.

It has less internal cargo space and is overall shorter.

It has considerably more leg room designed into it (and "less" cargo space) but once you factor in the Santa Fe's absolutely pathetic rear seat fold-down design (was this ever fixed?) its really not that much less usable cargo space.

Big cargo is what they make trailer hitches and/or $30/day rental trucks for...

JS

You are comparing apples and oranges. The JD Power IQS is NOT a reliability survey. It measures quality issues over a 90 day period, half of which covers design defects (are those knobs intuitive?) and the other manufacturing defects (do those panels align perfectly?). For reliability, you want something like the JD Power 3 year reliability survey (where Hyundai seems to do curiously badly). You can't measure reliability over just 90 days.

In any case, you have not said anything meaningful to discredit the CR survey. The results are empirical (they are ranked in terms of number of problems), so there is little room to "distill" the data. The JD Power results as reported in the media is even more "distilled" in that the news reports have far less details. Heck, they don't even tell us their sample size in their press releases. So you have no proof that CR manupilates their data, no proof that the data is biased, no proof that one "filters" their data more than the other. But the funniest part is that there is no way to defend the Tucson based on bias: even a biased study has no reason to favor one Hyundai SUV over another.

The reason for the reliability disparity is quite simple. While Hyundai has made remarkable progress in reliability, they may not be as consistent across all models or when first starting out. The Tucson is still very new, and Hyundai may not have gottent their act together yet on this model. Hyundais might need a number of years to get their reliability up. My 2001 Accent (a model introduced in 2000), is rated very poorly by JD Powers' 3 year reliability survey. But 2005 Accents are rated quite reliable by Consumer Reports. Since the Tucson is also only in its 2nd year, you might have a couple of years to go for it to shape up.

Chris

Right, and by the same logic, Consumer Reports is not really a reliability survey either -- it's a "historical reliability survey." Here's the problem: CR sends out surveys in the spring and reports the results in November. This means the CR data you read today reflects what owners thought in 2005. Any major changes in quality occurring in

2006 is missed by current CR data and won't be published until this November.

For car companies whose quality and reliability patterns are relatively static, CR ratings are fine. But Hyundai is improving quality by leaps and bounds. CR's methodology is too slow to give an accurate picture of what's going on ^today.^

With JD Power's 90-day survey you at least get a timely snapshot of recent owner experiences. If they have to take their cars back to the dealer frequently due to quality issues, it's going to show up in Power's survey.

For Hyundai, IMHO, I think you have it backwards. They are making strides in quality very quickly, and the trend seems to be the newer the design the better the build. This does not surprise me, the Koreans are world leaders in computerized design, manufacturing and automation. This may be why the newer models are doing so well in JD Power (fresher data) and not Consumer Reports (last years data). In fact, CR wrote that the predicted reliability of the 2006 Tucson will be "worse than average." From what we know today, that prediction has proven to be dead wrong.

I say you are way too optimistic -- you are predicting the future -- based on wrong data. As I said, the JD Power IQS is NOT a reliability survey. You can't extrapolate reliability from this study. Nor should it suggest that the current Tucson should improve significantly: why do you assume it improved its IQS score? It has always done well. According to Edmunds, the

2005 Tucson scored 4/5 overall on the IQS. The 2006 Tucson also scores 4/5 on the IQS. So naively going by the unchanged IQS score, we can assume that the 2006 Tucson should be about as reliable as the 2005. Unfortunately, in the CR reliability survey the 2005 Tucson ranks dead last in the small SUV category, tying with the Kia Sportage and Saturn Vue.

While I am optimistic about Hyundai's quality in general, it sure looks like the Tucson is a dud. This is the first Hyundai in years that scored this horribly. The current Sonata debuted on the charts with an above-average rating. The Santa Fe was always respectable across all years. The old Accent and Elantra never scored this bad out the door. My fear is that there is something badly wrong with the Tucson. You seem to be expecting miracles to happen with the Tucson, but Hyundai simply does not have that kind of track record. The Sonata is reliable now, but when it was introduced in 2000 it spent the first 2 model years with below-average reliability. There is absolutely no proof that Hyundai turned around the Tucson in just one year.

Chris

Consumer Reports, the people that put the Toyota Corolla and the Geo Prism on opposite ends of the reliability scale (EXACT SAME VEHICLE) in the early 90s.

The Sonata was introduced long before 2000... I want to say 1989 or

1990. The Sonata V6 was introduced somewhere in the mid 90s.

Where exactly does CR get its statistics from? "Thin air" seems a possible answer.

JS

Yes, Consumer Reports data isn't from a randomly selected sample, it is from a self-selected set of their subscribers. So you have at least two biases built in to start with. The bias of having only those people who subscriber and then the bias of having only those who choose to return the survey.

I've owned two cars that were also rated pretty much at the opposite end of CR's spectrum: an 84 Accord that rated well and an 89 Acclaim that rated poorly. The Accord was a lemon (engine failed at less than 80,000 miles - only engine I've had in 30 years of driving that failed) and the Acclaim was the rock of Gibralter.

Matt

You realize, you have defined away the entire field of surveying. There will always be some selection issues in statistical sampling, precisely because it is sampling. There will always be the bias of having getting only results from people willing to return results. You won't get that theoretical purity without testing absolutely everyone and forcing them to submit an answer. Then that is no longer a survey.

Valid sampling simply means to make sure that the sampling does not significantly distort the results. And here, the CR bashers' arguments evaporate. Nobody has been able to prove that -- or even explain how -- CR's sampling distorts in its stated purpose of comparative reliablity. I repeat: comparative reliability. Why should a CR reader who owns a Tucson be more biased against his car than a CR reader who owns a Santa Fe? Feh.

CR's survey has a sample size of about a million: 20 times the size of JD Powers' 3 year reliability survey. Its results are empirical: it counts the problem incident rate. I don't see how there an be a statistical or bias fluke when the Tucson and Santa Fe's ratings are so far apart. I believe the CR's sample size has grown to the point where its numbers are fairly consistent for the more popular models. Case in point: the Tucson's reliability score is virtually identical to the Kia Sportage, its mechanical twin.

Chris

CR doesn't rate the reliability, they report the statistics based on what the readers report. If the Toyota scored higher, then it was because the Toyota owners reported fewer problems than average in the survey.

Statistics come from surveys sent out to CR subscribers. CR just compiles the data and reports what the surveys say.

Precisly. It doesn't mean that the Toyota car had fewer problems, it only means that owners of Toyota cars reported fewer problems in their surveys. As long as you keep in mind that their data isn't data on car reliability, but simply a summary of the biases of their readers, then you are fine.

The only real way to get good reliability data would be to have the repair records of each car. Owner's are notoriously unreliable in their assessments of car reliability and things that I would consider an issue, may not even register to you. Just look at the comments in this group about the Sonata tank sloshing for example. This is a design issue so ALL Sonatas have sloshing tanks, yet people here seem to fall into one of three camps:

1. Those who don't notice (maybe can't hear it or play loud music)
2. Those who notice, but don't consider it a problem.
3. Those who notice and consider it an annoyance.

Yet, all are describing the same thing.

Matt

I bought a 2005 Tucson V6 4WD with 3300 miles on it and have since added about 4000 miles. For me, it is the perfect size (length, width and interior), and all the features are really worthwhile. The one negative, which is extremely important, is the poor gas mileage, which has been commented on in this forum by others. My car is averaging only about 12 mpg, and a little better (maybe 14) on long freeway runs. For the total number of miles, 12-13 mpg has been the average, and it is disheartening.

Judy