2021 Hyundai Palisade: Full Review for Real Buyers in Australia
You can see the Palisade from space. But two weeks in, I’m deeply conflicted in the domain of love and hate, struggling to figure it out…
I’m having a ‘love/hate’ relationship with Palisade.
It’s an excellent vehicle - if you meet a tightly defined set of criteria, as the user - but it’s also packed with apparent contradictions. So here’s the 10 things I love about it - and the 10 things I hate.
LOVE
SPACE INVADER
If you’ve got up to eight arses to convey from A to B, and you also need luggage space, Palisade is a beast. This is a huge plus for a niche market of overenthusiastic breeders, and of course those who still cling to the ‘legacy’ concept of being gregarious. (When in fact, Palisade is an ideal vehicle if your objective is to maintain social distancing.) In reality, most seven-seat SUVs cannot carry anything, when there’s a derriere parked on every seat cushion. Palisade also earns bonus status points for being an actual an SUV - meaning you’re not damned to automotive hell for eternity by the curse of owning a people mover.
REGIONAL MOBILITY
Palisade has a proper, full-sized spare wheel and tyre, underslung, at the rear. This is perfect for regional touring.
There’s probably 900 kilometres of mobility in every 71-litre tank (at least, that’s about what you’ll get out of a tank of diesel) - so that could be rather a long limp home on a space-saver, after getting a flat in the middle of the night. Well done there for regional Australians - and for people in capital cities planning post-lockdown excursions. Remember those? Take that, Mazda CX-9.
EQUIPMENT OVERLOAD
This thing is fully loaded. Like, it would take until the middle of next week to run through all the features. There is no exhaustive high-priced options list to wade through - a somewhat grubby price-pumping scam favoured by the prestige brands to get you to part with an extra $25k more than you anticipated spending.
Palisade Highlander has it all standard. The 360-degree camera system. You get infinity electrical adjustments for the driver’s seat. It’s got two sunroofs, for God’s sake. And the climate control air conditioning even decides when it’s appropriate to blow chilled (or presumably warm) air up your bottom, through the perforated seat leather. One of those unexpected ‘surprise and delight’ features. Even if you are, however occasionally, wearing pants.
CABIN VERSATILITY
One size really does fit all, in a Palisade. You can be doing the whole ‘soccer mom’ thing one minute, and then nip down wherever and pick up some properly bulky item, nudge the seats aside, transport it home, and be back in time to pick up the kids from the game. And nobody will ever know about your sick, twisted cargo van fetish. You can also hedge your bets, internally, by mixing and matching passengers and bulky items, length-wise, and width-wise. It’s a very versatile vehicle.
DIESEL FTW
The 2.2 Diesel powertrain is the one to get. Eight-speed auto plus on-demand AWD is extremely well-suited to this vehicle. This will cost you $4000 more than the 2WD petrol V6, but it’s worth more than every penny in terms of both economy, refinement and performance. So if you’re on the showroom floor and flipping a coin on powertrains - get the diesel.
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DRIVING
This is a superbly comfortable vehicle to drive long distances [VO] It’s quiet, the ride is excellent and the dynamic performance is reassuring. Like, a vehicle this size is not something you chuck about, for kicks, but it is deceptively capable A-B on the open road. And it doesn’t feel like a tank on the open road (I’m looking at you, Toyota Landcruiser; Nissan Patrol.)
SEAT SELECTION
The fundamental choice you have to make on the Palisade is: Seven seats, or eight? Either way, the cost is the same - so this is about what you need, not what you can afford. Both versions get two buckets at the front and a three-wide bench at the back. Seven seaters get an additional two buckets in row two, and eight seaters get a three-seat bench in row two. I love the fact that there’s no price penalty either way.
If you’ve got young kids you get five top-tether child seat anchor points on eight-seat models and four on seven-seaters). The big trick for seven seaters is the walk-through functionality to access row three, but the one-button sliding built into row two is also excellent and efficient for accessing row three on eight-seaters - provided you don’t have to move a child restraint out of the way first.
PRICE POINT
Palisade is the most expensive Hyundai - at, like, $75k plus on-road costs for the diesel Highlander. And I know I say that like it’s a bad thing, but when you think about it, it’s actually about $54,000 cheaper than a fully-loaded Toyota Landcruiser. (And a Landcruiser 200 offers only seven seats.)
Before you blue-singlet bogans rip it into the comments, I know they’re not equivalent vehicles. Palisade does not do full-on all-terrain off-roading, nor does it tow 3.5 tonnes. But plenty of people who buy Landcruisers just use them for family transport - they drive out the house paddock driveway onto a dirt road, they head five kays to the bitumen and then they drive 30 kays into town. Rinse and repeat.
Palisade will do that kinda driving all day long, and feel better, and more refined, the whole time. So there’s that. And $54,000 is rather a lot of money, to most people, especially when you dump it on a depreciating so-called ‘asset’.
CLEVER INTERIOR
They’ve put a lot of thought into the interior. The floating console is extremely space efficient.
This USB cable management port between the storage area on the ground floor and the penthouse in the console lets you charge two USB devices in the penthouse, or three if you use a 12-volt to USB converter in the cigarette lighter power outlet in the basement. And these magic centre cupholders are also very versatile and space efficient.
You get wireless inductive charging for your smartphone, and there’s a tonne of additional USB outlets, storage spaces and air vents throughout the cabin. So, even in row three you’re hardly slumming it.
DEMOCRATIZING LUXURY
I’m gunna get fan-boy flack for saying this, but like I care: In the 1990s, if you bought a prestige car, it cost you roughly twice as much as a mainstream car the same size. But at least you got more - more safety, more performance, more comfort, more convenience. I’m talking tangibly more - measurably, objectively more car for your money.
But today, you don’t actually get that. Or, if you do, the margin (of tangibly more luxuriousness) is substantially less. What you’re really paying extra for today is the intangible cachet wrapped up in the prestige brand. It’s, like $75 grand for the big, fat SUV … and $75,000 for the three-pronged suppository badge up the pointy end.
Part of this is because essentially all technology is available off the rack today. Radar-rangefinding adaptive cruise control is a widget available to any carmaker. Direct injection. Latest safety tech. Infrared cabin air temperature-sensing zone-specific HVAC. AEB. Blind spot monitoring … whatever. They’re all just off-the-shelf widgets.
Essentially, mainstream brands like Hyundai have snuck up on luxury brands like the three-pronged suppository. And it’s put the squeeze on the prestige brands, because it’s objectively harder for a prestige brand purchase to be justified.
Of course, the flipside of this is that, fully loaded, this is an $80-ish-thousand-dollar Hyundai. And that’s a concept which will challenge some people.
Like, if you went 100 per cent Rip van Winkle in about 2005 and only just woke up today, in time to hear me say ‘$80,000 Hyundai’, you would of course wonder which universe you had awakened in…
HATE
TOW JAM
It’s bigger than Santa Fe but doesn’t tow as much. 150-kilo towball download limit makes a mockery of the 2200-kilo tow capacity. If you want tow capacity in this big, fat, soft SUV class, get a Santa Fe: 2500kg and 200 on the towball, out of the box.
PRO TIP FOR TOWING:
Hyundai tells me it’s working on a genuine load assist kit, similar to previous Santa Fe, which will increase the permissible towball download limit to 200kg.
Until then, the safe and conservative among you should strictly adhere to the standard 150kg towball download limit and keep your trailer’s aggregate trailer mass to 1500kg. This will maintain overall dynamic stability and will keep you and other road users operating with a healthy margin of safety.
Experienced and qualified towing regulars, I repeat - experienced and qualified operators - you can probably get away with putting 150kg on the towball if you’re running the 2-tonne permitted trailer load with the 2.2-diesel engine which is the ideal engine for such a task. That’s about 7.5 per cent of the trailer weight on the ball.
But I suggested you should only do this if you have no other alternative, and for obvious reasons, drive extremely conservatively. This means keep you speed at 90km/h or less (no matter who’s on your caboose), tyre pressures perfectly inflated at all times and with no signs of wear/tear, the trailer is roadworthy, and you (ideally) have an electronic brake controller or simply apply brakes gently while allowing yourself more than enough braking distance to all vehicle ahead of you - then you’re probably going to be quite safe while keeping others so.
THE V6
As discussed: the diesel is the one to get. It’s only about five per cent more, and it’s gunna be roughly 20 times better.
Hyundai and Kia need to drop the V6 and start running with the 2.5 turbo petrol engine (soon to be revealed in new Tuscon >>) in vehicles like this, meaning: Santa Fe and Sorento, and package it with AWD. Because it’s a superior engine in every respect.
If they’d use the 2.5, Palisade would immediately be a Mazda CX-9 beater. It’s time, dudes. Like, this engine is already developed and ready to go.
FACE FACTS
It doesn’t look like a next-gen Hyundai product externally - like, look at the new Santa Fe, just launched, and upcoming Tucson, Sonata N-Line, etc. This looks like the previous generation product, at least, to me.
But I think I can fix it, helpfully. So, let me know which you prefer: ‘Factory bling’, or ‘Stealth’.
COUNTERPOINT ON PRICE
Palisade costs about $10,000 more than a Kia Carnival - which is approximately as versatile and as capable, except for the Carnival’s lack of AWD. And the seating on Carnival is actually more versatile, principally because it does something Palisade cannot - which would be to morph between seven and eight seats, and back, as many times as you like.
Of course, the Carnival is cursed in the minds of many by its categorisation as a people mover, which for many people is about as alluring as the promise of a DIY vasectomy.
WHITE KNIGHT?
White leather is such long-term disaster. Like, everything from the dye in new jeans to the residual on your palms (when it smears onto the white leather door pulls) is going to be a long-term aesthetic disaster. Moisturiser. Hand sanitiser. Lube.
Anyway, white leather comes with this blue paint (called ‘Midnight Cloud’ because everything needs a name, apparently) and also with the charcoal grey exterior (which also has a wanky name: ‘steel graphite’ - a nonexistent substance. Well done. Is every marketing genius in the universe also scientifically illiterate?)
But if you go for black paint (sorry ‘Timeless Black’), or white (correction ‘White Cream’), or even ‘Sierra Burgundy’ - with these three colours (white, black and dirty brown, two of which aren’t actually colours) you get a nice burgundy leather interior. Much more practical and durable. So there’s that.
GETTING A GRIP
For all the convenience built into the Palisade, there’s no front passenger grab handle. Like, in what universe does that go through to the keeper? There are two grab handles - per side - in row two. (One for getting in, and one for climbing in to row three.) Well done/respect - but nothing for ‘she who must be obeyed’ up the pointy end, directing the driver - instructing endlessly. That’s a bit of an oversight in a flagship, I’d suggest.
PARKING IT
When you select ‘park’ the automatic handbrake applies - sometimes. And by ‘sometimes’ I mean: if you’re on a slope. Therefore, there’s a gradient sensor, and it does the thinking for you on parking brake application. When you’re on more or less flat terrain, however, the Palisade just goes into ‘P’ and the parking brake remains off.
Here’s a shot of pulling up on the flat - the transmission is in park, but the parking brake is deactivated. And this is what happens on a hill - full automatic activation of the parking brake when you select ‘P’ on the transmission.
I know that a pin gets jammed into the transmission when you select ‘Park’. I know the car’s not going anywhere at this point. And I suppose this logic reduces wear and tear on the mechanism, ultimately.
But at the end of the day I find myself being something of a ‘belt and braces’ guy on parking. Meaning I prefer some redundancy in the apparatus of restraint, the better to prevent the mother of all runaway disasters, even if it’s just once every 20 years. I’d prefer the park brake to go on every time. Call me old fashioned.
You can, of course, apply the parking brake manually, which kinda defeats the purpose of making it automatic, in my estimation. Good luck finding the switch. In every other vehicle on earth with this feature, the electronic handbrake switch is right there, next to the transmission shifter.
But not in Big P - it’s over on the dashboard, on the right side, kinda hidden under the steering wheel, where the lane-departure warning on/off switch, and other switches are. The ultimate counterintuitive handbrake switch placement, if you ask me. And I don’t know why it’s there, because it’s not as if there’s no spare real estate over near the shifter.
So now you know, and if you’re stopped somewhere level, with a flat tyre, about to jack the car up to fit the spare, you’ll be able to apply the parking brake - as well as on every other occasion the computer deems it unnecessary, in my case.
Adding insult to injury on this, if you are parked, pointed downhill, and the park brake is applied, when you select ‘Drive’ to drive off, the car won’t roll until you nudge the throttle. You can’t just roll gently under gravity, because a throttle input is required for the computer to tell the car to release the semi-autonomous parking brake. This makes for a fairly unrefined downhill takeoff, and you’ll find yourself reaching down and to the right, often, if you want to do this smoothly.
So, all up, an annoyingly large amount of manual intervention for a system which, one assumes, was designed to be automatic.
BELTING UP
Following on from that last point. If you are parked and the park brake is deployed, you can’t drive off unless you clip your seatbelt. This too is - at times - a proper pain in the arse. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating driving without a seatbelt. That’s ridiculously dangerous and socially irresponsible.
However, at times, say, parked in your moderately slopey driveway, you might want to reposition the car to wash it, or whatever. And there’s no particular risk, not wearing a seatbelt, on private property, moving a car slower than walking pace, without buckling up.
This is not a deal breaker for me, but it does seem somewhat of a ‘nanny state’ intervention, philosophically.
SOUNDS OF SILENCE
One of the most soul-destroying aspects of modern technology is how eight brainiacs in a room can figure out how to make an otherwise nice automobile invasively irritating in its default state.
Palisade - and it’s not the only Hyundai Motor Group vehicle to do this - comes pre-loaded with fake ambient background audio. And, yeah, you can turn it off, thankfully.
The options are: Lively Forest, Calm Ocean Waves, Rainy Day (these last two: very confronting with a full bladder and 200 kays to go).
Number four: Open-air Cafe (somewhat insensitive in the context of COVID). Warm Fireplace, and Snowy Village.
Why go to this trouble? I did at first hate this, let’s call it ‘feature’, passionately, and then I thought: The only thing missing here is the ability to upload your own bespoke ambient tracks, a little something for the next road-tester to enjoy, perhaps.
I would love to install tracks like:
Caligula’s Vomitorium, for a sense of historical perspective.
ScoMo press conference (might need a narcolepsy warning on that one).
Ventilator in ICU - that’s contemporary.
Titanic Lifeboat Struggle - move over Leonardo Di Caprio, literally.
Door to Door in Ramadi.
Guantanamo interview.
And who could forget the haunting, timeless classic: Highlights of my Week with Dysentery.
Or you could just let the car sound like a car, dudes. And if people want, they could just play their own audio. Lively Forest.
THE BIG BUCKS
I know I previously talked up the price, but if you want eight seats for eight arses and space for luggage, configurability, versatility - etc., a Kia Carnival is $10k cheaper, ballpark, and also quite a good thing. For the same kind of saving, in club SUV, you can own the works burger of Santa Fe - seven seat only, and less ultimate interior volume, but it tows more, and does almost everything else just as well.
Palisade is available in two model grades - Palisade and Highlander. There’s no real base model. It’s more a mid-spec and a high-trim variant. So, if the budget is tight, you can relax, because the base ‘Palisade’ is hardly ‘poverty. The price difference is $11,000, which is substantial, but if you can live without the twin sunroofs, the full Nappa leather, the two-speed auto tailgate, the heated and ventilated front and row 2 seats, and the heated steering wheel, you’ll be quite okay in the more affordable Palisade.
All of you people going ‘it’s too big’ - or even worse: ‘it’s too big for the little woman’ - get a grip. Palisade is just under five metres long - meaning it’s 635mm longer than an i30 hatch. Call it two feet, in the old money. We’re not talking ‘semi trailer’ here. There’s no universe where you can’t handle a Palisade if you can handle an average small car.
Hyundai says right-drive Palisade was delivered primarily for Australia, and the dynamics tuning is pretty much spot on for our - let’s be kind - at times ‘third world’ road system. Palisade is actually just one of 18 new Hyundais due over the next 18 months - bit of a product revitalisation onslaught there - which includes the latest Santa Fe and an all-new Tuscon, which looks really impressive.
If you want a big SUV and you can’t choose between Palisade and Santa Fe - buy the Santa Fe. Objectively the justifications for Palisade are: You need eight seats and you can’t consign yourself to a people mover. Or you need maximum internal cargo versatility - like, cargo space with all seats occupied, or family transport that you sometimes also use for transporting bulky items.
SAFETY RATING
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens on safety - meaning ANCAP’s safety rating for Palisade - because Palisade is objectively one of the safest vehicles you can buy. Critical side-airbag head protection covers all three rows, according to Hyundai, for example.
However, ANCAP’s ever-shifting safety-rating goalposts could well downgrade Palisade’s official safety rating. We’ll have to wait and see on that, because it could be super confusing for consumers to make an informed decision.
Whatever happens there, Palisade remains an extremely safe SUV. It shares the same platform as the Kia Telluride which was tested by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last year and received five stars.
CONSLUSION?
I don’t know that I’ve solved my deep inner conflict here - and, like I care, because I’m giving it back tomorrow, and picking up a BMW. Occupational hazard.
But I do hope I’ve at least crystallized the cases for and against buying a Palisade - the better to help you make the right choice with a serious wad of cash.
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