Both the Santa Fe and Taos have child safety locks to prevent children from opening the rear doors. The Santa Fe 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 Taos’ 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.
In the past twenty years hundreds of infants and young children have died after being left in vehicles, usually by accident. When turning the vehicle off, drivers of the Santa Fe are reminded to check the back seat if they opened the rear door before starting out. The Taos doesn’t offer a back seat reminder.
The Santa Fe’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 Taos.
The Santa Fe SEL Premium/Limited/Calligraphy has a standard Surround View Monitor to allow the driver to see objects all around the vehicle on a screen. The Taos only offers a rear monitor and rear parking sensors that beep or flash a light. That doesn’t help with obstacles to the front or sides.
The Santa Fe has a standard blind spot warning system which uses sensors to alert the driver to objects in the vehicle’s blind spots where the side view mirrors don’t reveal them and moves the vehicle back into its lane. A system to reveal vehicles in the Taos’ blind spot costs extra.
To help make backing out of a parking space safer, the Santa Fe 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 Taos.
The Santa Fe’s driver alert monitor detects an inattentive driver then sounds a warning and suggests a break. According to the NHTSA, drivers who fall asleep cause about 100,000 crashes and 1500 deaths a year. The Taos doesn’t offer a driver alert monitor.
Both the Santa Fe and the Taos have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front side-impact airbags, side-impact head airbags, front seatbelt pretensioners, front wheel drive, height adjustable front shoulder belts, plastic fuel tanks, four-wheel antilock brakes, traction control, electronic stability systems to prevent skidding, daytime running lights, rearview cameras and available all wheel drive.
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 is safer than the Taos:
|
Santa Fe |
Taos |
Overall Evaluation |
GOOD |
ACCEPTABLE |
Head Restraint Design |
GOOD |
GOOD |
Distance from Back of Head |
34 mm |
38 mm |
Dynamic Test Rating |
GOOD |
ACCEPTABLE |
Seat Design |
Pass |
Fail |
Torso Acceleration |
11.1 g’s |
13.3 g’s |
Neck Force Rating |
Low |
Low |
Max Neck Shearing Force |
0 |
0 |
(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 its highest rating: “Top Safety Pick Plus” for 2022, a rating granted to only 87 vehicles tested by the IIHS. The Taos is not even a standard “Top Safety Pick.”