For enhanced safety, the front seat shoulder belts of the Hyundai Santa Fe Plug-In Hybrid are height-adjustable to accommodate a wide variety of driver and passenger heights. A better fit can prevent injuries and the increased comfort also encourages passengers to buckle up. The Ford Bronco doesn’t offer height-adjustable seat belts.
Both the Santa Fe Plug-In Hybrid and Bronco have child safety locks to prevent children from opening the rear doors. The Santa Fe Plug-In Hybrid has power child safety locks, allowing the driver to activate and deactivate them from the driver's seat and to know when they're engaged. The Bronco’s child locks have to be individually engaged at each rear door with a manual switch. The driver can’t know the status of the locks without opening the doors and checking them.
Over 200 people are killed each year when backed over by motor vehicles. The Santa Fe Plug-In Hybrid Limited has standard Parking Collision Avoidance Assist that uses rear sensors to monitor and automatically apply the brakes to prevent a rear collision. The Bronco doesn’t offer backup collision prevention brakes.
The Santa Fe Plug-In Hybrid’s standard lane departure warning system alerts a temporarily inattentive driver when the vehicle begins to leave its lane and gently nudges the vehicle back towards its lane. A lane departure warning system costs extra on the Bronco and is not available with Base.
To help make backing out of a parking space safer, the Santa Fe Plug-In Hybrid has a standard rear cross-path warning system, which uses sensors in the rear bumper to alert the driver to vehicles approaching from the side, helping the driver avoid collisions. Rear cross-path warning costs extra on the Bronco and isn't available on the not available.
For better protection of the passenger compartment, the Santa Fe Plug-In Hybrid uses safety cell construction with a three-dimensional high-strength frame that surrounds the passenger compartment. It provides extra impact protection and a sturdy mounting location for door hardware and side impact beams. The Bronco uses a body-on-frame design, which has no frame members above the floor of the vehicle.
Both the Santa Fe Plug-In Hybrid and the Bronco have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front side-impact airbags, side-impact head airbags, front seatbelt pretensioners, plastic fuel tanks, four-wheel antilock brakes, traction control, electronic stability systems to prevent skidding, crash mitigating brakes, daytime running lights, rearview cameras and available around view monitors.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety rates the general design of front seat head restraints for their ability to protect front seat occupants from whiplash injuries. The IIHS also performs a dynamic test on those seats with “good” or “acceptable” geometry. In these ratings, the Santa Fe Plug-In Hybrid is safer than the Bronco:
|
|
Santa Fe Plug-In Hybrid |
Bronco |
| Overall Evaluation |
GOOD |
ACCEPTABLE |
| Head Restraint Design |
GOOD |
GOOD |
| Distance Below Top of Head |
-1 mm |
20 mm |
| Dynamic Test Rating |
GOOD |
ACCEPTABLE |
| Seat Design |
Pass |
Pass |
| Torso Acceleration |
11.1 g’s |
13.8 g’s |
| Neck Force Rating |
Low |
Medium |
| Max Neck Shearing Force |
0 |
132 |
| Max Neck Tension |
369 |
770 |
(Lower numerical results are better in all tests.)
For its top level performance in IIHS driver and passenger-side small overlap frontal, moderate overlap frontal, side impact, roof strength and head restraint tests, its standard vehicle-to-vehicle front crash prevention system, its standard vehicle-to-pedestrian front crash prevention system, and its standard headlight’s “Good” rating, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety grants the Santa Fe Plug-In Hybrid its highest rating: “Top Safety Pick Plus” for 2022, a rating granted to only 77 vehicles tested by the IIHS. The Bronco is not even a standard “Top Safety Pick.”