Can You Spot What's Wrong With This Brand New Hyundai Tucson?

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Automakers aren’t perfect. Hold on, before you slap me, just hear me out: Quality control is generally damn good among modern carmakers, but mistakes still happen. Thankfully, they’re usually not big, dangerous mistakes, but more often something minor — and I suppose a bit embarrassing. Something like the thing that’s wrong with this 2022 Hyundai Tucson.

We were sent these photos by someone who works at a dealership, and I’ve taken the liberty of obscuring some of the background and other identifying elements to eliminate any unwanted blowback. But everything about the vehicle itself is unchanged.

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See if you can spot what’s wrong with this 2022 Hyundai Tucson from these images:

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Front quarter: The new ones look good! Hyundai is doing interesting things with camouflaging the lighting into the grille lately.

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I can see a hint of the issue here.

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...and now it’s on full display. Did you catch it?

If not, here, I’ll show you:

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That’s not a Santa Fe!

Just to compare, here’s a 2022 Tucson butt and a 2022 Santa Fe rump:

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They don’t even look that much alike. Their taillight designs are very different, and the model badges are even on opposite sides of the tailgate.

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Checking Hyundai’s site, as you can see on the screenshot from the video walkaround, it looks like the Tucson badge is on the left there. So I guess it’s only reversed on the Euro ones.

Still. It’s the wrong name.

I’ve been to factories and seen how these sorts of adhesive-backed badges are applied; there’s a special jig used to make sure everything is aligned properly, which means that whoever slapped on this Santa Fe badge had to know something wasn’t right, I’d think.

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Anyway, this is hardly a debilitating error, and if I were shopping for one of these I’d kind of want the misbadged one just to enjoy the mild confusion I’d sow among gearheads (at least the hyper-alert ones).

Plus, I’d try to use that to get the price down a bit. By like, $20.