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Hyundai's first-ever pickup truck, the Santa Cruz is selling like hotcakes. Here are its 10 stand-out features we fell in love with.

Hyundai introduced its Santa Cruz model in 2021. After its debut, the vehicle sold the fastest out of any other in the market for the year and definitely edged out its competitors in terms of overall sales.

Moreover, the new Santa Cruz, which is part-SUV and part-pickup truck is one of Hyundai’s highest-sold vehicles ever. It sells 3.3 times faster than the average four-wheeler. Thus, there’s got to be plenty about the Hyundai Santa Cruz that sets it apart enough to have beaten the Chevy Corvette as the fastest-selling new vehicle in the American market.

A bold yet refined sport-adventure vehicle, the 2022 Santa Cruz sets a new bar for three segments at once—SUVs, trucks, and crossovers. It is the Korean carmaker’s first-ever pickup truck, and they seem to have hit the mark quite well. Here are our favorite features of the 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz which make us want to drive home with one right off the assembly line.

The 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz certainly comes off as striking, and the design team has done a great job on the exterior design. The unibody of the Santa Cruz flows seamlessly from hood to bed, but one thing seems to be jarring as it stands out-the wheel arches don't flow over the tires but instead have tiny notches on top of their plastic cladding.

However, there's more to these notches than meets the eye. Hyundai revealed that these little Easter egg logos on the car, with the silhouette of the Santa Cruz, are blanking plates that support Hyundai GoPro mounts. They're available on the optional fender flares and not the base, but hey, it's a cool feature if you want it.

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As a unibody pickup truck, the Hyundai Santa Cruz is far from the biggest pickup truck on the market. Nevertheless, Hyundai has attempted to make the best out of the unibody pickup-slash-SUV by providing storage compartments throughout the car. The first concealed storage compartment runs underneath the backseat, which reveals itself after pulling the seat up.

The bed of the 2022 Santa Cruz has plenty of storage space too, with concealed compartments built into the sides as well as the bottom of the bed. Thus, anywhere you go to beat the heat, you could do it quite well with an icebox right in the bottom of your pickup bed, with chilled bottles up for grabs. Moreover, one of the compartments even comes with its own charging port.

The hidden compartment built into the bottom of the bed of the new 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz is not just for show. It aces the functionality aspect of its tests quite well. Whether you store ice in the compartment or anything else that you don't want to see sunlight or rain, a hole in the corner of the pit drains everything to the bottom of the car.

So even in case you spilled something in the compartment, a quick wash should take care of it, while the clever drainage hole takes care of the run-off. Moreover, if you choose to unlock the cover for the compartment through your key fob, it will automatically re-lock if the driver or passenger door isn't opened in the next 30 seconds.

RELATED: Here's How The 2022 Ford Maverick Stacks Up Against The 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz

For all of its exterior design quirkiness, the 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz does not have a lot going on in the interior. You'll find the usual Hyundai hallmarks with a refined seating and center console, but the one thing that does stand out is the cloth trim that runs seamlessly, running along the doors to the dashboard.

The rest of the interior is pretty decent, with a beautiful center console that remains buttonless. The rest of the interiors, while great to look at, could be easily mistaken to be that of a Tucson or Santa Fe. It comes in the top trim, though, and the Santa Cruz has plenty of trims on offer to suit your needs.

The 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz comes with a heated steering wheel for when you're braving the roads in icy cold temperatures, and your fingers refuse to move or bend. Moreover, Hyundai didn't go the way of Toyota, where only the middle portion of the steering wheels in the Prius and Venza heat up.

In the Santa Cruz, the entire wheel gets heated and takes just less than a minute to reach full heat. Even though the heater in the wheel doesn't turn on upon a reboot of the vehicle, it is still a nifty feature that really counts on a rainy or snowy day.

RELATED: Here’s How The Hyundai Santa Cruz Stacks Up Against The Honda Ridgeline

The Santa Cruz has all the safety features you'd expect from a Hyundai car in 2022. The one that stands out on this pickup truck, however, is the automatic blind spot monitor that switches on every time you give your turn signal.

This feature works especially great on the interstate, where there certainly would be a blind spot since you're in a pickup. While changing lanes or going for an exit, the automatic blind spot monitor would project a live feed of your blind spot behind you in the lane next to you to ensure you can safely turn when the time is right.

That's right, there's nothing more that can be said about it. While the 2022 Santa Cruz features an instrument gauge behind the wheel that does change colors and some design cues here and there depending on what mode you put the engine in, it can also take on a completely different look that will definitely throw you off.

Upon messing around with the settings of the fastest-selling car in America right now, you'd see that you can go from a traditional round speedometer and RPM gauge to a different, edgy, and futuristic-looking cube display. Granted, it is different and weird, but it sure looks like something very different from any other cluster out there.

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While the 2022 Santa Cruz doesn't have something as sophisticated as an air suspension, it does boast a pair of self-leveling shocks. This works best during the times when you load your Santa Cruz's bed with some heavy stuff that weighs down the rear end.

The shocks then sense being in a different position. Thus, when you start driving and the wheels begin moving, some of that pressure gets stored within the shocks, which they use to self-level back to normal, thereby returning the Santa Cruz back to balance. The rear of the truck then locks back in, leveling the position of the truck. Moreover, whenever you unload the truck, the suspension will let itself back down to the neutral position. This is easily one of our favorite features in the 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz.

If it has wheels and an engine, Samarveer Singh is going to be obsessed with it. He is a budding Indian motorcycle racer, competing at the national level in his country in his very first year, chasing his dream around every corner of the racetrack. A touring enthusiast, Samarveer is forever stuck between the urge to constantly redline his bike, or save its clutch plates for longer.