It's a spacious and comfortable 7-seater: Hyundai's all-new Grand Creta

Image credit: Naresh Maharaj

The addition of the seven-seater Grand Creta, with different looks and design features than its five-seater namesake, means that Hyundai now offers an even more comprehensive and one of the biggest ranges of sports utility and crossover vehicles in South Africa. With two specifications levels – Executive and Elite – for features and equipment and a combination of two different engines and gearboxes, the Grand Creta line-up of five derivatives offer a wide choice to customers.

“When you look at vehicle size, convenience and feature levels and pricing, the Grand Creta definitely had slot to fill in our vehicle offering,” says Stanley Anderson, sales and operations director at Hyundai Automotive South Africa.

Exterior

Tough, yet graceful. Dominating, yet elegant. Hyundai’s Grand Creta pairs a bold and tall stance with an elegant design. The bold front grille with its dark chrome accents fits in with the rest of the Hyundai range. The more-than-ample 20 cm ground clearance is evident from its recognisable SUV profile.

Image credit: Naresh Maharaj

Viewed from the side, the body is noticeably longer. The Grand Creta Executive derivatives’ 17-inch wheels and the Elite’s 18-inches are both attractive and adds to the impressive profile with their bold wheel arches. At the rear, a dark chrome strip between the rear light clusters, a bold Hyundai logo above it and twin-tip, rounded square exhaust outlets round of the back design.

Spacious interior

The interior of the Hyundai Grand Creta immerses you in uncluttered design. Complete with premium dual-tone interiors and artificial leather seats in all derivatives, the carefully selected materials accentuate the aesthetic. An airy and cool ambience is created by the light-coloured seats.

An infotainment system with an 8-inch touch screen and connectivity for Apple’s CarPlay or Android Auto forms part of standard luxury features across the range, as well as a steering wheel with multi-function buttons for the sound system and cruise control. Wireless charging in the centre console for smartphones is a standard feature across the range.

However, the outstanding interior feature is the two seats that fold out of the floor of the boot area to provide space for 7 occupants. With the rear seats down, the cargo area offers 1 670 cubic litres of space, and with all seatbacks up, 180 cubic litres of space behind the third row. The second-row seatbacks can be folded down in a 60:40 ratio, which enables several seating configurations – allowing inter alia the transportation of long objects.

Engine and transmission

The Hyundai Grand Creta comes with two powertrains that include a 2-litre Smartstream MPi engine and a Smartstream 1.5-litre diesel CRDi engine with options of a 6-speed manual and a 6-speed automatic transmission.

In the entry-level Executive versions, the two-litre naturally aspirated petrol engine is coupled with a 6-speed manual transmission and the six-speed automatic gearbox, while the turbocharged 1,5-litre diesel engine is linked with the six-speed automatic gearbox in an Executive and Elite derivative. There is also an Elite version with the two-litre petrol engine and the automatic transmission. All derivatives are driven through the front wheels.

An exceptional feature of the turbodiesel derivatives is their fuel efficiency – a consumption figure of fewer than five litres per 100km can easily be obtained on the open road, which makes the official combined cycle figures of 6,5 litres per 100 km very realistic. Fuel consumption for the petrol engine was measured at 8,5 litres per 100km for the manual transmission derivative and 8,9 litres per 100km for the versions with the automatic gearbox. All the drive modes are there including snow, mud, gravel and sand. And then there is Eco, Sport and Normal drive modes.