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Photo: KDesign AG / Behance
The South Korean automaker Hyundai has been extremely successful in the United States, where it reported August 2026 and year-to-date sales that bewilder with their positivity.
While Hyundai Motor America reported total August deliveries of 86,977, a two percent drop compared to last year, the eighth-month tally is actually two percent up – to over 620k units. Hyundai’s hybrid vehicle lineup continued with a new August record, with sales up 33% year-over-year, while the Tucson (+18%) and Santa Fe (+5%) SUVs achieved their best-ever August sales results, for example.
Speaking of the Hyundai Tucson, at home in South Korea the automaker continued to push forward with the all-new fifth generation NX5 Tucson compact crossover SUV, showcasing the best-selling nameplate in front of a live audience for the first time at home and showcasing both the regular model as well as the rugged XRT version.
Next up, Hyundai has already teased its roster for the 2026 Paris Motor Show, and we can bet our lunch money that its all-new Bayon and Tucson will be among the major premieres. But over in America, some things don’t go according to plan, including the sales of the locally-produced Santa Cruz unibody compact pickup truck. As opposed to its sibling, the Tucson, which grew 7% during the first eight months to almost 159k units, the Santa Cruz went down to just 13k – plunging 30% from January through August.
Naturally, Hyundai won’t be coming out with a second generation and instead it’s flipping a different switch with a proper mid-size body-on-frame pickup truck that will not face off with the popular Ford Maverick and instead try to snatch the crown of the beloved Toyota Tacoma. That’s a hard call, of course, since the competition in the mid-size pickup truck segment in the US is fiercer than in the unibody compact niche.
As such, someone thought about a simple solution – since the all-new Hyundai Tucson is now larger and way more rugged-looking than its predecessor, why not continue the Hyundai Santa Cruz lineage along the same coordinates as today? After all, the biggest criticism to the latter is that its Tucson-derived style is way too soft for the pickup truck sector of America.
So, here’s a member of the imaginative guild of digital car content creators who stopped dwelling across the parallel universes of vehicular CGI and instead cooked up the unofficial, hypothetical next-generation Hyundai Santa Cruz design project: Kleber Silva, a Brazil-based virtual artist known as “KDesign AG” on social media, has decided to have a CGI go at imagining the unibody compact pickup truck all over again.
More precisely, the fiercer, larger, and more robust Hyundai Tucson has been digitally reengineered without the third side window and D-pillar as the Santa Cruz unibody compact pickup truck. Due to the Tucson’s larger footprint and more aggressive boxy design, the Santa Cruz could benefit from extra cargo space and a rugged look that would put to shame the Ford Maverick rival.