Hyundai's Santa Cruz truck will enter production in Alabama in 2021
The truck will be based on the 2015 Santa Cruz concept shown at NAIAS, and that's awesome.
Hyundai's Santa Cruz truck concept totally blew our socks off when we saw it back in 2015, and now, some four years later, it's been confirmed that not only will we get here in the US, but that it'll be built in the US too. In Alabama, specifically, according to a release published Wednesday by Hyundai.
The truck will be built at the Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama (HMMV) plant near Montgomery, and to help get that facility ready, the company is giving it a $410 million facelift. The Santa Cruz is set to go into production in 2021, and it will join the Santa Fe , Sonata and Elantra , which are already built there.
That $410 million is only a fraction of the $1.1 billion investment by Hyundai in HMMV, which isn't exactly couch change, man. The factory employs 2,900 people in full-time positions and another 500 in part-time jobs. The Santa Cruz line is expected to add another 200 jobs to that figure.
For those of you who don't remember much about the Santa Cruz, it's meant to be a smaller competitor to the Honda Ridgeline and to a lesser degree, trucks like the Ford Ranger and Chevy Colorado . The concept had some reasonably aggressive styling, and we'd be just as pleased as punch to see it carried over to production with as few changes as possible.
As far as powertrain specs, towing capacities, or pretty much anything else goes, we're in still being kept in the dark.
