2020 Hyundai Santa Fe vs Mazda CX-5

What's the difference?

Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, the 47th US state, and according to that ever-reliable journal of record, Wikipedia, home to 27,569 households, 24.1 percent of which include children under the age of 18.

So, Hyundai had obviously done its sociology, demography, and geography homework in naming its evergreen, family-friendly SUV after this picturesque southern US city.

Or, of course, it could just be a suck up to the critical American market, along with the Tucson and Kona, helping the South Korean brand ease more readily into the North American landscape.

Either way, the Santa Fe has been a solid, if not spectacular performer since its local launch in the early noughties, with the latest, fourth-generation version arriving in Australia in mid-2018.

To freshen things up a new 3.5-litre, naturally aspirated petrol V6 version was added to the line-up in late 2019. And we spent a week investigating whether extra cylinders send the Santa Fe to the big leagues.

I think it's fair to say the Mazda CX-5 has done about as much a single model line could have done for the population explosion of SUVs. The car is still selling like crazy when the economy isn't crippled by a global pandemic and that's despite the second-generation shuffling itself into more upmarket territory.

The CX-5 Akera is not the car people tend to go into Mazda dealers to buy without first doing their homework. Despite hardly anyone (relatively speaking) buying the Akera, you have a choice of three engines, the naturally aspirated petrol, the turbo-petrol and the turbo-diesel (in ascending price order).

The latter two both start at over $50,000. You can't spend that much on a Tucson or a Sportage, or even a RAV4. So you're going to want to know what you're getting yourself into, right?