Hyundai Santa Fe interior

Infotainment

Entry-level SE models come with a seven-inch touchscreen infotainment system. It’s mounted above the dashboard so you can glance at it easily as you drive along and it comes with a colourful screen that’s bright enough to read in direct sunlight.

The menus are reasonably easy to navigate through and there are plenty of physical shortcut buttons to help you quickly skip between key features. The system also includes a neat feature that lets you create your own page and fill it with your favourite shortcuts – to things like your preferred radio stations or to go straight to the sat-nav’s destination input screen.  

Overall, it’s not quite as intuitive as the system you get in a Skoda Kodiaq, but you can easily change the radio station or make a call using the standard Bluetooth connection without taking your eyes off the road for too long.

Sadly, entry-level SE cars don’t come with sat-nav, but you do get smartphone mirroring for Apple and Android devices so you can use your phone’s navigation apps through the Hyundai’s built-in screen instead.

Go for a Premium or Premium SE model and you get a digital driver’s display instead of conventional dials and a wider 8.0-inch screen that’s even easier to read and comes with built-in sat-nav as standard. This is easy to program and it doesn’t take long to enter an address using the on-screen keyboard, but it’s not quite as good as using Google Maps through Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

Speaking of smartphone mirroring, these features also let you play music from streaming services such as Spotify through the car’s stereo. In a model with SE trim, this is a fairly nondescript six-speaker unit, but Premium and Premium SE cars get a much louder Krell stereo with 10 speakers and a subwoofer for punchier basslines.

All but SE cars also come with a wireless charging pad for your phone, too, so you won’t have to worry about constant music streaming draining your battery.