South Korean brands have some of the safest vehicles on the road, and when it comes to automakers with the most, Hyundai is clearly at the front. The automaker now has a total of 10 vehicles that have been named as a Top Safety Pick from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Six of these cars have nabbed a Top Safety Pick Plus award from the institute, the latest being the 2019 Hyundai Santa Fe, but only when it's fitted with LED headlights.
The redesigned 2019 Santa Fe has a starting price of $26,480 (all prices include the $980 destination charge), but models that qualify for the Top Safety Pick Plus designation start at $33,580 – what it costs to get into the Limited trim where the LED headlights are standard.
The LED headlights received a rating of “Good,” which helped the vehicle earn the IIHS' highest rating. The lower trims – SE, SEL, and SEL Plus – are fitted with projector headlights as standard. The IIHS found those to be “Marginal,” lowering the score for those Santa Fe models to just a Top Safety Pick.
The Santa Fe aced all of the institute's crash tests, earning a score of “Good” in all of them, including the difficult small over lap front test. Hyundai offers a lot of standard safety equipment on the new Santa Fe, including forward collision-avoidance assist with pedestrian detection, which points toward the SUV's score of “Superior” for the IIHS' front crash prevention tests. The only item to not get the highest rating possible is the Santa Fe's child seat anchors that earned a rating of “Acceptable.”
For the 2019 model year, Hyundai switched things up for the Santa Fe, as the two-row model is now simply called the Santa Fe instead of the Santa Fe Sport. The three-row variant has been renamed the Santa Fe XL. Seeing as how it's largely a carry over model from 2018, we expect the Top Safety Pick Plus rating the SUV earned last year to carry over for the seven-passenger vehicle.
With the Top Safety Pick Plus rating, the new Santa Fe joins the Subaru Ascent, Kia Sorento, and Honda Pilot as some of the safest options in the mid-size SUV segment. Models that missed out on the plus designation but were named Top Safety Picks include the Mazda CX-9 and Toyota Highlander.
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