When you travel around Iceland by car you soon appreciate that not all four-wheeled drive cars are equal (actually, you learn the same living in Yorkshire in snow). When we booked, we upgraded our hire car from a regular 4×4 to a “Discovery Sport or equivalent”. Clearly the Icelandic use of the word ‘equivalent’ has an alternative, if not slightly ironic, meaning. Similar to the way they call some eruptions “tourist volcanoes”.
We ended up completing 2,987 km (1,856 miles if you’re American and can’t work in Celsius) so I’ve spent enough time in the Hyundai Santa Fe (that Avis thought was equivalent to a Land Rover Discovery Sport) to offer a short review.
Positives first. It has a big boot. It has air-cooled front seats. The touchscreen allows Android Auto. It had some form of drive assist that allowed you to set your cruise control speed and if it met a slower vehicle it would slow down to sit at the right distance behind. It had a useful heads-up display (though I couldn’t see it with polarised sunglasses on). It had a useful cubby-hole beneath the centre console big enough for one of my DSLR cameras, accessible from both sides. The engine isn’t bad (1.6 litre petrol with a mild hybrid boost means good pick-up) – it’s let down by a horrible gearbox…oh I’ve started the downsides already…
Important negatives first. This is not a 4×4. It has 3 “off-road” modes (snow, mud, sand) none of which made any difference off-road, nor seemed to provide improved levels of control. On gravel roads, of which there are numerous, it slid around in all driving modes – good car for drifting round gravel corners next to sheer drops then. That’s not to say it can’t off-road, it’s just not very good at it. We visited a glacier (or at least tried to) accessed via a long and rough trail – in the process we seemed to detach some of the underside of the car that protects the engine. This remained loose for the rest of the holiday, slowly being ground away!
To evidence required off-road capabilities, here’s a few examples of what the Icelandics drive. Point made.
Some other ‘features’ we enjoyed:
- It made more warning noises than necessary – it binged and bonged merrily each time you got in, with no clear rationale for each tone…you just had to wait for it to sing its song before you could start it.
- It pulled to the right on flat roads – actually this could have been the camber on most paved roads (tarmac to us in the UK) which was quite severe. Still, it loved to wander towards the edge of the road, typically to an unmade edge and then steep drop.
- It had no idea when it should change gear, nor when to deploy battery assist, making for some interesting accelerations (or lack thereof).
- It nagged constantly. Take a break. Put your seatbelt on. Don’t fall asleep. Turn me off before locking. Take a break. Why have you left me on again? Take a break.
- The start-up routine was akin to that a 747 pilot has to endure. A sequence of buttons was required to get it moving, and get that sequence wrong and you need to start again.
- The handbrake was not automatic, despite it being electronic. Who would design a car this way?!?! Put it in park or switch it off and the handbrake should automatically apply. Stupid Hyundai.
- The steering had literally no feel to it. I was mostly aiming it and hoping that my steering input suggested it move to where I might want it to be.
- The suspension was either broken or designed by an engineer who didn’t realise it was a 4×4 and hence shouldn’t hit the bump stops with the slightest hole off-road.
- The lane-keep warning system had to be disabled each time you started the car, otherwise guess what…it nagged you to keep in the lane with vague noises and vibrations that could have been any one of the nags it deployed to alert you to something which might be happening.
Despite all this, ‘El Nos’ as it became to be known did have one very useful feature for the traveller in Iceland…..
We called this feature the “geology shelf”, located just above the glove box – somewhere to store all the rocks we collected as we travelled! It was perfect for the task. So, if you are travelling to Iceland, don’t want to do any off-road (which literally means you’re going to get so far around the main ring road before having to turn around), like being nagged, and you’re going to collect rocks as you go, then this is the vehicle for you.
