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Hyundai Santa Cruz pickup with four doors, five seats, due around 2020

You could boil three years of coverage on the Hyundai Santa Cruz pickup to a question mark. The "crossover truck" debuted at the 2015 Detroit Auto Show, then got swallowed in the executive turmoil at Hyundai Motor America. Reuters reported last year that the Santa Cruz would finally arrive by 2020 as part of the South Korean carmaker's push into SUVs. Motor Trend recently spoke to Brian Smith, the COO at HMA, and got a crucial detail on the eventual truck. Forget about the sleek, two-door concept from Detroit — the actual item will be a "four-door ... that seats five." The redesigned Hyundai Tucson is also due in 2020, the compact crossover providing the platform for the Santa Cruz. If connecting the dots is really this simple, it mean's we'll be getting Hyundai's version of the Honda Ridgeline, the only unibody compact pickup on sale in the U.S. at the moment. And that makes us wonder how the Santa Cruz will fare whenever it gets here. Anyone who wanted to put money down on something similar to the highly popular concept has been booted from the game. They've been replaced by those who can be lured by an alternative to the Ridgeline, but the questions are how many buyers is that, and will the production Santa Cruz be the right truck to close the deal? In 2016, then-CEO Dave Zuchowski said Hyundai research showed the possibility of moving at least 50,000 pickups a year, and other studies suggested 70,000 sales could be possible. Even at the low end, that suggests a remarkable pent-up demand for the kind of truck that's never succeeded in the U.S. The Ridgeline sold 34,749 units in 2017, and numbers are down nearly 30 percent down so far this year. Meanwhile, the body-on-frame (BOF) GMC Canyon sold 32,106 units last year, and it was merely piggybacking on the Chevrolet Colorado, which did 112,996 sales. Even the BOF Nissan Frontier, last refreshed during the Bronze Age, sold 74,360 models. What's more, by the time the Santa Cruz gets here, the new BOF Ford Ranger will revel in actual pent-up demand, and the really cool kids will still be cooing over their new BOF Jeep Wrangler pickup. Looking back at the Ridgeline space, we await word from Volkswagen on the fate of the Tanoak concept. Hyundai could choose to take a stand in the unibody pickup segment on price; the Ridgeline whips up its own headwinds by charging $8,000 more than a Canyon, $11,000 more than a Frontier. Still, a Tucson with a bed, that is two years away ...

Hyundai spotted testing Prius-style hybrid

The Toyota Prius has become an automotive icon – maybe less so among actual automotive enthusiasts than with the public at large – to the extent that most anyone on the street would recognize its five-door hatchback form and immediately identify it as a hybrid. Little wonder that Honda tried to emulate it with the second-gen Insight, but while that didn't work out so well for Honda, it looks like Hyundai is preparing to go down the same road with a dedicated hybrid of its own. Our paparazzi on the ground in the Arctic Circle have spotted this protoytpe and tell us what we're looking at is a new Prius-fighter from the Korean automaker. Snapped up high on a transporter truck, you can see the orange high-voltage cables underneath and a label with the letters AE HEV – the latter standing, of course, for Hybrid Electric Vehicle. We wouldn't be surprised if the AE stood for Advanced Experimental or Alternative Energy or something of the sort. Tipped to be based on the same platform as the next-generation Elantra, the new Hyundai hybrid is said to pack a 1.6-liter inline-four working in parallel with an electric motor juiced by a lithium-ion battery pack. It's expected to begin production in the second half of 2016, with a plug-in and possibly other variants to follow a year to a year and a half after its initial launch.

Hyundai to buy electric vehicle batteries from SK Innovation, according to report

SEOUL — Hyundai Motor and affiliate Kia Motors have decided to secure electric vehicle batteries from SK Innovation for the next four to five years, Maeil Business Newspaper said on Friday, citing industry sources. The sources said the deal was worth more than 10 trillion won ($8.6 billion). SK Innovation, Hyundai Motor and Kia declined to comment. Hyundai Motor said in October it would launch 16 EV models by 2025, aiming to boost EV sales 560,000 by then, a level that would be equivalent to more than 10% of its projected global sales this year. Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin. Related Video: