Words: Richard Edwards
Published 27 August 2026
Hyundai has confirmed its first extended-range electric vehicle, a Santa Fe EREV with a combined range of more than 965km, launching in North America in the first half of 2027.
The announcement came at the company’s CEO Investor Day in Seoul. Genesis will follow with a GV70 EREV in early 2027, targeting more than 1,030km.
The Santa Fe EREV is a serial hybrid: its petrol engine works solely as a generator, never driving the wheels. Hyundai’s layout uses just two electric machines to deliver all-wheel drive, a front unit that doubles as generator and drive motor, and a dedicated motor on the rear axle. The company says the system delivers around 1.6 times the range of a conventionally powered Santa Fe from a single tank and charge.
“Most notably, it achieves a driving range of over 600 miles, a defining feature that truly lives up to its name,” Chang Hwan Kim, Hyundai’s head of electrification energy solutions, said when the technology was previewed at last year’s investor day.
The battery is Hyundai’s own. The in-house cells use mid-nickel NCM chemistry, chosen over the high-nickel formulations of its current EVs, and the company claims more than double the power output of its previous high-nickel cells. The result, Hyundai says, is a pack with less than half the capacity of an equivalent battery-electric model that gives away nothing in power, while costing around 30% less to produce and cutting charging times by 40%. Cell mass production begins in mid-2027.
The EREV will be assembled at Hyundai’s Alabama plant alongside the petrol and hybrid Santa Fe, with prototypes carrying the internal MX5a EREV designation spotted testing in South Korea since April. The programme was first flagged at Hyundai’s 2024 investor day with North America and China as its target markets.
The model forms part of a wider North American plan of 58 new or refreshed Hyundai models by 2030, under which the company expects hybrids of all types to account for about half its US sales by the end of the decade. The EREV arrives alongside the facelifted Santa Fe running the brand’s new Pleos Connect software.
The New Zealand picture
The EREV has been announced for North America only, and Hyundai NZ told us it isn’t confirmed for the local market “at this stage.” The Santa Fe sells here with 2.5-litre turbo petrol and hybrid powertrains, from $69,990 to $104,990, with the plug-in hybrid version of the current generation reserved for Europe.
The announcement adds the industry’s largest mainstream players to a technology wave already reaching New Zealand from China, where extended-range models such as Leapmotor’s Ultra Hybrid B10 are on sale now and iCaur’s V25 follows in 2027.
