Hyundai Santa Fe vs. Kia Sorento: What’s The Difference?
Hyundai Santa Fe by Kevauto — CC-BY-SA-4.0
SUVs are extremely popular due to their roomy interiors, great driving feel, and robust sets of safety features. In recent years, people have valued these factors more than ever, so finding the right SUV is a difficult yet important task. Hyundai and Kia make some of the best SUVs on the market today, and finding the difference between their models isn’t easy. Thankfully, if you’ve found yourself in this boat, you’ve come to the right place! We’ll give you all the information necessary to decide between a Hyundai Santa Fe vs. Kia Sorento.
A Brief Overview
While the Hyundai Santa Fe and Kia Sorento are both excellent SUVs and you can’t truly go wrong with either of them, we have to say that the Santa Fe is likely the best choice for most drivers. It’s less expensive and offers stronger features from the base trim up. However, it only has two rows of seating in contrast to the Sorento’s three rows of seating, so if you want to drive many people, that’s a major factor to consider.
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Specs
A huge difference that should be outlined right off the bat in the Hyundai Santa Fe vs. Kia Sorento battle is their seating. While the Sorento has three rows of seats, allowing up to eight passengers to ride in the SUV, the Santa Fe actually only has two rows, holding up to five people. If you plan to drive many people around frequently, then this factor could be a game-changer. Now that we’ve clarified this let’s talk about the engines in each vehicle.
Both the Sorento and Santa Fe actually have the exact same engine choices. You get to decide between a 2.5 Liter, 191 horsepower engine and a turbocharged 2.5 Liter, 281 horsepower engine. These are both great options and won’t factor into your final decision for a car since there’s no difference between them whatsoever.
Cargo space is often a major factor in car shoppers’ minds (especially those looking for an SUV), and the Sorento definitely wins here as it’s the bigger car. If you put all the seats down, the Sorento will provide you with almost 76 cubic feet of space. Keep the second row of seating up, and you’ll still get 45 cubic feet. The Santa Fe, on the other hand, grants drivers 72 cubic feet of space with all seats down and about 36.5 cubic feet behind the second row of seats if the seats are up. The gap here may not be enormous, but it can certainly make a difference if you’re looking to haul a lot of equipment.
Safety and Reliability
SUV drivers often rank safety as one of the most important factors that go into their car-buying decisions. The disparity between a Hyundai Santa Fe vs. Kia Sorento in terms of safety and reliability is relatively small, but it’s still something you should know about before making a purchase. Both of these cars will keep you and your family safe on the road, but which safety features you get in the base trim does vary, so if you’re looking for particular features, pay close attention to this section.
The major difference between the Santa Fe and Sorento in terms of safety features is not what they have but in what trim you receive the features. For the base trims and above, both cars feature pedestrian detection, collision avoidance assist, automatic emergency braking, and driver attention warning. You also receive blind-spot monitoring with all trims as well as dynamic parking guidance, in addition to a top-of-the-line, modernized rearview camera with crystal clear pictures. Where these vehicles start to split apart is that the Santa Fe also includes front seatbelt pretensioners, traction control, and hill start assist control (among other things) in its base level trim, whereas the Sorento requires you to buy a more expensive trim for those features. The difference is still relatively small between the two SUVs, but we have to give the victory to the Santa Fe.
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Gas Mileage
As both of these SUVs have the same engine options, it should come as no surprise that fuel economy is not a major battleground in the Hyundai Santa Fe vs. Kia Sorento comparison. However, the Sorento is a bigger car since it’s a three-row SUV as opposed to a two-row SUV, so it gets slightly worse fuel economy.
The 191 horsepower engine in the Sorento should get you roughly 24 miles per gallon in the city and 28 miles per gallon on the highway, while it’ll get you about 25 miles per gallon in the city for the Santa Fe. The turbocharged engine in both cars returns an estimate of 22 miles per gallon in the city and 28 miles per gallon on the highway, so there’s no real difference there.
Technology
Many SUV drivers place a lot of importance on cutting-edge technology, and you definitely get different tech with a Hyundai Santa Fe vs. Kia Sorento.
The 2021 Kia Sorento comes standard with an infotainment that has a ten+ inch touchscreen equipped with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, a Bose audio system, rear occupant alert, and keyless entry. It also has a nice mood lighting system. The 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe has similar features, but the ones it has in its base trim are, for the most part, better. Here, we’re looking at an eight-inch touchscreen with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, a Multi-Information Display center, and a six-speaker sound system. As you go up the trim levels with each car, the tech gets more and more high-class, but the Santa Fe always stays a bit ahead of the Sorento.
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Price
Price is a significant factor in the Hyundai Santa Fe vs. Kia Sorento debate, as the Santa Fe is cheaper than the Sorento across the board, despite the fact that it’s a stronger car in many categories.
The Kia Sorento’s base trim costs around $30,000, while the base Santa Fe trim starts at around $28,000. This gap continues to be about $2,000 throughout all trim levels, so the Santa Fe is the clear winner in this category.
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