Living with the 2021 Hyundai Palisade Highlander

• Welcome: Bigger Fish to Fry
• Part 2: Room to Brood
• Part 3: Part 3: Precipitation Station
• Part 4: Time for a Change
• Part 5: Remote Dial Up
• Part 6: A Sizeable Whole
• Specifications

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STORY CONTINUES

Welcome: Bigger Fish to Fry

Price as tested: $75,000 (MSRP)
Fuel this month: 346km @ 11.6L/100km

What do you give the bloke who’s just handed back a large, seven-seater Korean SUV, in which he only ever managed to fill two of those seats at any one time?

Easy! Give him an even larger Korean SUV that seats eight.

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Not that I’m complaining, and the transition to this top-spec Palisade Highlander diesel will be instructive in terms of how it compares to that top-spec Kia Sorento I ran for the last four months.

No, the two are not eye-to-eye segment rivals due to the Palisade being slightly larger and featuring a three-seat third row (versus two in the third row for the Kia), but the model line-ups of both do overlap enough on price that they’ll surely be cross-shopped by some buyers for whom the third-row accommodation is not a dealer breaker either way.

In terms of price, there’s a fairly hefty premium attached to the extra size and additional rear seat of the Palisade. This range-topper, finished in Steel Graphite, is $75,000, so about $10K more expensive than the (same engine, and also AWD) Hyundai Santa Fe from the segment below, and about $13K dearer than the (again, same engine, AWD) Kia Sorento GT-Line I just vacated.

And no, you don’t get more equipment for your money in the Palisade. Straight away, I see the Palisade is missing a few features that are fitted to the Sorento, like a customisable digital dash, and controls for the front-passenger seat on the right-hand bolster.

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Neither is a big deal for me, and ample compensation comes with some of the other neat details I find. As I open the sub-floor storage compartment that houses the cargo blind, I see it also contains a rolled-up tailored floor mat that neatly unfurls to line the boot floor when the third-row seats are folded, stopping any boot debris from dropping through the gaps. The full-length compartment is also the ideal stash spot for an umbrella and picnic rug (if you’re me or Mary Poppins), or maybe a sawn-off shotgun (if you’re Roger Rogerson.)

Up front, the lidded centre console box is appropriately XL-sized, while ahead of this is a generous storage space that can be configured to hold two water bottles, or allows the bottle retainers to be retracted, leaving the space clear for more of your personal stuff. There’s also an under-console storage space which will probably end up as the receptacle for my partner’s handbag, or my handbag if I go back to the cross-dressing thing.

In terms of price, there’s a fairly hefty premium attached to the extra size and additional rear seat of the Palisade.

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There’s no wireless CarPlay, but otherwise general functionality and user-friendliness gets a big tick, as does visibility and seating. The front seats have generous electric adjustment for under-thigh support, so instantly feel super comfortable.

Admittedly the cabin’s off-white shade of leather isn’t the most practical choice for a knuckle-dragger like me, so I’ll need bring my hygiene A-game.

Speaking of trim, the attempt at pale beechwood veneer around the dash and door trims looks as if it came straight from Faux Appliqués R US, but that’s a small, subjective gripe. Otherwise the sense of quality is overwhelmingly positive, as is the overall intuitiveness of all minor controls and menus.

So how does it drive? With a degree of cohesion and wieldiness you may not expect from something with its own postcode. More next month.

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Part 2: Room to Brood

Fuel this month: 558km @ 11.2L/100km
Total fuel: 898km @11.4L/100km

Okay, I was both a bit uncharitable and factually inaccurate last month when I suggested the Palisade is big enough to have its own postcode.

If we go to the tale of the tape, we see it’s 4980mm long, so yes, nearly 200mm longer than the Santa Fe from the class below, but nearly half a metre (!) shorter than the Rangers and Hiluxes which masquerade as family SUVs these days.

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But having recently attempted to fold myself into the third row in the name of science – imagine a raw sausage being squeezed into a matchbox – I’m a bit unconvinced of the Palisade’s ‘eight-seater’ ability. Yes, there are three seatbelts back there, but I would have thought that kids small enough to fit three-abreast would surely need booster seats, of which you’re only going to be able to fit two. Hmm...

Thankfully this remains an entirely hypothetical scenario for me, leaving me free to keep both the third- and second rows folded, and use the massive load space for all my beach and barbeque gear, as well as a palatial transportation pod for my small dog. She rides tethered to one of the ISO-fix hooks of the reclined middle-row backrest, and seems to relish her self-appointed role of both navigator and emergency alert officer when she spots another dog out for a walk.

Having attempted to fold myself into the third row in the name of science, I’m a bit unconvinced of the Palisade’s ‘eight-seater’ ability.

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In terms of the driving experience, two things have come as pleasant surprises. The first is engine NVH. This is the older iron-block version of the 2.2-litre turbo-diesel four used by Hyundai and Kia, yet it’s marginally quieter and less vibey at idle that the all-aluminium unit in the Kia Sorento I ran most recently. Still way louder and more coarse than the petrol alternative, but hey, that’s the trade-off for the torque and lower consumption.

Second pleasant surprise is how dynamically sorted the Palisade feels. This model hasn’t enjoyed local tuning of suspension or steering, yet the ride, body control and precision through the wheel all have real finesse.

My gripes list remains curiously short. Will try harder next month.

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Part 3: Precipitation Station

Fuel this month: 941km @ 10.5L/100km
Total fuel: 1839km @10.9L/100km

Took a day trip recently to visit a 200-million-year-old rainforest. It was a two-hour drive each way south of Sydney, and it reinforced two truths. Firstly, being immersed in an environment so ancient is an excellent way to feel less old. Secondly, while the Palisade is an excellent family tourer, there is, like most things in this world (apart from Peroni beer and the English Staffordshire Terrier) room for some improvement.

Disabling lane-keep assist is the first ritual every time I start the car. I find its incessant nibbling at the wheel nothing but a distraction, yet it’s incapable of consistently keeping you in your lane with any reliability if you’re inattentive enough to need it.

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Fittingly, it started raining as we approached the rainforest of Minnamurra Falls, so naturally I had the wipers on their most sensitive auto setting. The screen quickly became wet enough to impede vision. “Oi, can I get a wipe, thanks?” I (accidently) said out loud.

My partner gave me the side-eyes: “Are you talking to the windscreen wipers?” she asked.

“Don’t be ridiculous, honey,” I shot back. “I’m talking to the rain sensor...”
This car has a very different idea to me as to what constitutes ‘wet’, so I’ll have the sensor checked at service time.

Disabling lane-keep assist is the first ritual. I find its incessant nibbling at the wheel a distraction, yet it’s incapable of consistently keeping in lane.

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Meanwhile, just to revisit the NVH subject I touched on last month: Yes, the 2.2 diesel has a slightly less vibey idle and low-rev coarseness than the newer unit in the Kia Sorento, but that’s kinda faint praise. Diesel fours really are the charmless sloggers of the engine world, even ones from the premium German brands, and this one is no different. It deals with the Palisade’s 2000kg load quite admirably, but you never rev harder than absolutely necessary.

Motorway cruising also reveals the Palisade’s sensitivity to surface changes. On hot mix it glides along almost noiselessly; the moment you hit a more coarse-grade bitumen, the noise levels leap. Likewise, ambient noise from trucks and motorcycles isn’t sealed out quite as well as I’d hoped. I suspect the vast glass roof is the primary source of decibel penetration. But hey, it does do a decent job of keeping out the rain.

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Part 4: Time for a Change

Fuel this month: 635km @ 10.3L/100km
Total fuel: 2474km @10.7L/100km

If the essence of good design is all about intuitive ease of operation without the need for an instruction manual, then things were off to a good start recently when the Palisade copped a puncture. Let’s face it, us blokes know that reading instructions is a sure sign of weakness, right up there with the inability to perform a humane spider removal.

I could see the spare wheel mounted externally underneath the rear of the car, so how hard could it be to whip it out from under there and bolt it on in place of the flat left front?

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The answer was right there in the sub-floor of the cargo space: a small plastic cap with ‘spare tyre’ written on it. So I grabbed the tools and jack, and got to work. Whip the cap off with the screwdriver to expose a nut, slip over the socket tool, and turn. The spare is lowered via a cable; once at its lowest, it’s a bit of grubby faff to support the weight of the wheel with one hand while freeing the cable’s retainer plate to completely liberate the spare.

Next faff – jacking over two tonnes of SUV not especially keen to levitate off my car park floor. The scissor jack is a labour-intensive little bastard, and each turn nets only a few millimetres of raised body height. And because there’s so much suspension droop, the jack needs to be cranked to near its maximum to get fresh air under the tyre. That was a hard grind that came with a strong language warning. Getting the wheel off was no problem, but getting the spare back onto the hub required some heavy lifting and a bit more swearing, at which point I was questioning my once strong-held belief of run-flats being the work of a ride-ruining devil.

The scissor jack is a labour-intensive little bastard, each turn nets only a few millimetres of raised body height.

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Anyway, less than 30 minutes later I’d finished the task with a glow of manly satisfaction, which lasted right up to the moment I climbed back into the car and went to reset the tyre pressure monitoring system (TPMS). The display blinked sullenly at me, refusing to take the reset command. A quick call to Hyundai explained why: the spare isn’t fitted with the clever valve that communicates with the TPMS, so I would have to bring the car in to have the repaired tyre and original wheel refitted.

That made me feel a tad deflated.

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Part 5: Remote Dial Up

Fuel this month: 324km @ 10.0L/100km
Total fuel: 2798km @10.5L/100km

My no-longer-teenage daughter jumped in the front passenger seat of the Palisade the other day, and cast her eye around the vast cabin as she paired her phone to the multimedia system with the ruthless, intuitive efficiency only a Gen Z can.

Once I’d convinced her to play some old-school hip-hop instead of her nu-school computer-generated ear floss, we settled in for the short drive to lunch.

In a rare moment of lifting her eyes from her phone, she spotted the drive mode selector and asked a reasonable question: “Hey dad, what does this thing do?”

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I sensed this was my big moment to impress her with my extensive knowledge of the Palisade’s seven different drive modes, and go into excruciating detail as to how each one is tailored for specific conditions, and how there are seven wondrously unique blends of throttle mapping, transmission calibration, EPAS assistance, and front-to-rear torque splits to enhance traction in even the most challenging conditions.

I didn’t, of course, because I would have bored her so rigid I would have had to carry her out of the car like a fence post. So I kept it simple: “Not as much as you may expect, honey.”

Which is a very abridged version of my experimentation of the drive modes, that, I must concede, hasn’t been as comprehensive as I’d have liked due to lock-down restrictions. Oh, and the perplexing absence of mud, sand and snow on the commute within my 10km-restriction zone.

I can attest that selecting Sand on a dirt track did bring a noticeable increase in rearward torque bias. But it’s not oppo-lock rallycross nirvana.

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I’ll get further into the off-road stuff in a moment, but let’s first take a deeper dig at the four on-road modes: Eco, Comfort, Smart, and Sport. Having experimented with all of them, I struggle to notice any tangible difference between Smart and Comfort, even if the Palisade’s technical info assures me there is.

The difference between Eco and those two is also pretty subtle: a slightly softer throttle response and more languid, less eager calibration for the eight-speed auto, which becomes a bit too snoozy for my taste. I failed to record any economy advantage in Eco, but that’s probably down to my slight impatience with the transmission in this mode, where I find myself manually plucking the paddles to get the desired ratio and engine response. Your results may differ if you can soft-pedal the car in the manner in which Eco pretty much insists.

Which isn’t to suggest that I hoof the Palisade with a leaden right foot in my normal daily driving. I simply can’t because most of my neighbourhood is a 40km/h zone, and the main roads in my LGA are infested with both fixed cameras and mobile speed cameras devoid of warning signage. Which is part of the reason I tried Sport mode once, and haven’t returned to it since.

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Yes, it makes the transmission usefully more eager to kick down with the slightest throttle prod, but the flipside is that it holds the shorter ratio long after your brief sporting moment has passed, so you revert to paddles to make an upshift to quieten the engine down and avoid a public flogging for exceeding the speed limit by 10km/h. Sport also adds weight to the steering, which, to me, at least, just makes it heavier and less feelsome, not more sporting. And don’t forget the Palisade is on passive dampers, so there’s no firming of the chassis tune when Sport is selected.

As for the off-road modes? Well, I can attest that selecting Sand on a dirt track did bring a noticeable and useful increase in rearward torque bias, which instantly gave the Palisade a much more planted and traction-enhanced dynamic character. But it’s not a instant ticket to oppo-lock rallycross nirvana. You need to switch off the ESC to make the thing move around to any meaningful degree, and the safety net remains there in the background and will intervene anyway if you try to get too sideways. As for Mud and Snow, I can’t pass judgment, but I suspect the difference between them in the real world, on those two surfaces, would be marginal, and the Palisade’s slippery-surface behaviour would be more greatly affected by tyre choice and pressure.

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You can see where I’m going with this. I’m not alone in my theory that automotive marketing departments probably have more influence on the inclusion of multiple driving modes than the powertrain bosses.

If it came to the crunch, I suspect the Palisade really would lose little by having just two modes: on-road and off-road. But that sort of reasoning is also why I’ll never land a job in marketing.

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Part 6: A Sizeable Whole

Fuel this month: 324km @ 10.0L/100km
Total fuel: 2798km @10.5L/100km

My buddy Jay has been my best mate since we met in high school, so as with any long-term relationship, the occasional homicidal urge does have to be suppressed by both parties.

Like the other day when he was casting a critical eye over the Palisade. Jay likes cars, but he’s not an obsessive, and large SUVs don’t really blip his radar. “So how much?” he asked. “Seventy-five large,” I told him. He let out a low whistle.

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I had to explain there’s a hefty premium of around $10,000 for the Palisade’s extra size and eight-seater accommodation over the seven-seaters below it, like in-house sibling the Santa Fe Highlander, or Kia’s Sorento GT diesel. I also mentioned that the three-tier Palisade range now kicks of at $55,000, but Jay wasn’t really listening. “Still sounds like a very fat wedge for something that you don’t actually enjoy driving,” he sniped.

I didn’t slap him with my thong, even if he was hopelessly wrong.

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I can honestly say that I’ve absolutely enjoyed every drive in the Palisade, and not just because it provided a brief respite from the sameness of being in COVID lockdown for a chunk of the loan period. An SUV like this is proof that you don’t have to be driving the doorhandles off something low and sporty on a remote backroad for it to qualify as an enjoyable drive. Just soaking up the Palisade’s comfort, amenity and response to inputs was ample for me to always enjoy every outing in it. That, and the fact that I rate even an average drive as better than, say, completing your greatest-ever tax return.

But as the six-month mark rolls around and it’s time for the eight-seater to go back, here’s my wish list of jobs for the facelift.

An SUV like this is proof that you don’t have to be driving something low and sporty on a remote backroad for it to qualify as an enjoyable drive.

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Firstly, the diesel engine. Oil-burners may be on the endangered-species list, and there’s no question the Palisade would be an even better thing as a turbo-petrol hybrid (currently not on the horizon.) But for as long as it’s offered with the 2.2-litre diesel, the main area for improvement (along with meeting next-gen emissions regs) is noise and vibration. Both are far from horrible, but some extra soundproofing to cut the clatter would be welcome, as would a better balance shaft or more sophisticated engine mounts to quell the high-frequency vibes at idle. In the petrol variant you’re barely away it’s actually running at idle, whereas the Palisade diesel’s decibel reading of 45db shows there’s ample scope to do better.

No gripes about the engine’s strength on the move, though, nor the calibration of the excellent eight-speed auto. It’s also frugal on a highway run, which drops the fuel burn to around 7.5L/100km, down from high nines around town.

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The slightly laboured, unappealing engine note is really only evident in low-speed driving, and the obvious fix is to follow the sage advice of Michigan rockers MC5, and kick out the jams.

Which the Infinity audio system does mighty well, especially when fed high-resolution files, rather than relying on the slightly compressed-sounding DAB radio. The one caveat is that tracks with really intense sub-bass – and only when cranked up to near-concert-level volume – can cause a slight rattle in the front doortrims. My work-around was to cut an old beach towel in half and stuff each of the door bins, which solved the issue, but a minor redesign of the trims’ mounting system would be the proper solution and save a few towels.

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The rest are really just small gripes I’ve already touched on like the lane-keeping that I had to disable before each drive. Only one button press, sure, but I’d really like it to be part of the customised set-up specific to each driver, so the car would recognise me as a I jump in, and disable it while setting the seat and mirrors.

The other small but important thing that needs to function more reliably is the speed-sign recognition. It misreads the signs at least 30 percent of the time, often indicating you’re in a 50km/h zone when it’s actually 40km/h. Not to be relied on.

For a family that needs eight seats and doesn’t want a people- mover, Palisade really is in a class of its own.

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But for a family that needs eight seats and doesn’t want a people- mover, Palisade really is in a class of its own. Or, configure it as a seven-seater (two bucket seats in the second row are a no-cost option) to give walk-through access to the third row, providing a level of accommodation and versatility offered nowhere else. The fact Palisade won our large-SUV comparo against the Kluger and Mazda CX-9 (Wheels, Sept) pretty much says it all.

Share that with your mates.

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2021 Hyundai Palisade Highlander specifications