New Hyundai Santro: What to Expect

As we approach the new Hyundai Santro’s unveiling date of 9th October, here’s an account of what you can expect from the Korean car maker’s reincarnation of its original bestseller. 

Over the past two decades, Hyundai is the only car maker that has taken the fight to Maruti Suzuki’s doorstep. And while, Maruti Suzuki continues to easily dominate passenger car sales, Hyundai with its quality products has truly carved out a nice market place for itself. And one of the core products that helped established the Hyundai brand in India was the Santro.

Over its 16-year life span, the Santro badge became a brand name in itself as it proved itself as a trusty urban runabout. So much so, that even when the i10 came out in India and Hyundai discontinued the top-end variants of the Santro Xing, it continued to sell in decent numbers, much like their Accent mid-size sedan.

And now, having discontinued its original i10 last year in India, Hyundai is all set to bring its Santro brand name back.

New Name: Hyundai has been carrying out the Namkaran custom for its new Santro in order to find a suffix to along with the Santro name, much like that of the previous model, the Santro Xing. The new name will be revealed along with the car itself on the 9^th of October. So, stay tuned to autoX find out what the new Hyundai Santro will finally be named as.

Will meet front impact crash norms: All new cars sold in India are required to meet frontal crash norms, so the new Santro too as a modern offering will designed with a safe crash structure. Rest assured, a Global NCAP crash result for the hatchback should be around the corner.

What will it look like? We have actually caught a camouflaged version of the new Santro on test so we can tell you that it will retain the tall roofline of the original model. Hyundai infact has been clear in saying that it has incorporated its tall boy design in the new Santro. That aside, expect it to have some of those fluidic design cues that will give the car a nice cohesive look and a large front grille too.

Feature Loaded: We have come to expect a lot from Hyundai in terms of features and equipment from all its new cars. And the new Santro will be no different. Since the Santro will compete against the likes of the Tata Tiago and the Maruti Suzuki Celerio, expect it to come with features such as rear defogger and wash/wipe, alloy wheels, day/night interior mirror, electrically adjustable ORVMs as well as standard safety equipment such as ABS and dual front airbags. But Hyundai will be looking to take things up a notch as always and as such may offer a dual-DIN touchscreen infotainment system with steering mounted audio controls in top-end variants. This naturally means that higher end variants could get a reverse camera too. If this is the case, the Santro will be the only car in its segment to offer these features. That aside, we hope the car gets reverse parking sensors as well, like Maruti’s recent models. But then again, we have to keep in mind the segment that the Santro fits into. Still, parking sensors aren’t really an expensive bit of kit to include.

New Engine: With the Santro, we will also see a remake of its old 1.1 litre, four-cylinder engine. Although, this time around it will be engineered with BS VI specifications in mind. The earlier car had an ARAI rating of 17.92 km/l but you can expect this one to surpass that figure easily. It remains to be seen if the engine will have a 12-valve setup like earlier, it is unlikely that the motor will feature variable valve timing like that of the old i10’s 1.2 litre unit.