Wait, Are We Sleeping On The Hyundai Tucson’s Off-Road Capabilities?

When you’re shopping for a compact crossover, how capable they are off-road usually doesn’t even enter the conversation unless you’re talking about Subaru. And even then, it’s not like the Subaru Forester has gotten popular lately because people regularly take them off-roading. It’s more that the idea of going on off-road adventures is appealing, and buyers love being able to tell themselves they could totally get out there if they wanted. Buy anything else in the segment, though, and you’re pretty much admitting the most it’ll ever need to do is get you to a drive-up campsite. Or are you? 

To test that idea, our friends over at Australia’s CarExpert got 16 compact crossovers together to see once and for all which ones are actually more capable off-roaders than you might think. Since it’s an Australian publication, there are probably some minor tuning and equipment differences between the cars they tested and the ones you can buy at your local dealer, and they even included a few that aren’t sold in the U.S. at all, but that’s not so bad. It’s still a pretty good test of plenty of cars our readers could buy, just with a few bonus cars thrown in for good measure. 

They also didn’t exactly take all 16 compact crossovers to Moab, but we’re still talking about a pretty serious test here. After an initial check to make sure the body didn’t flex too much with two wheels in the air, they then put each SUV on an incline with rollers to test how well the all-wheel-drive system could handle only one wheel having traction. After that, it was onto the hill test, where they did their best to drive up a very steep hill. So, while it wasn’t the kind of testing that would humble a Jeep Wrangler, it does replicate several scenarios you might actually encounter in a compact crossover.

Before we get too far, though, I do need to apologize. As a car blogger, it’s my job to watch every car video the day it’s released, but this one wasn’t published today. I may have only found it today, but the video itself is three months old, therefore making this post three months late. Even though the video is old, though, how could I not write about it? In addition to being a rare test of how capable compact crossovers’ all-wheel-drive systems actually are, I also guarantee the results are not what you’d expect. 

Perhaps the biggest surprise here is that the Subaru Forester didn’t win outright. You’d think it would be way more capable than, say, a RAV4 or CR-V, and it just wasn’t. They were testing an Australian-spec hybrid, so it’s possible a U.S.-spec non-hybrid may perform better, but at least in this test, the Forester just didn’t have the juice. Then again, if you’re one of those people who assumed no crossover could possibly be any good off-road, maybe that result wasn’t super surprising to you. 

If that’s the case, then the crossovers that actually did pretty well here may be the bigger surprise. You might not like it, but based on the results of this specific test, the best off-roader in the compact crossover segment is none other than the Hyundai Tucson. Yes, that Hyundai Tucson. The one no one would ever expect would have any off-road capability beyond maybe driving down a gravel road without catching itself on fire. 

Even if you don’t care about off-roading, there’s still value here in what the roller test shows about each car’s all-wheel drive systems. If you want a car that can pass both the front and rear wheel test, you’ll want to check out the Tucson, as well as the Kia Sportage and the Volkswagen Tiguan. Alternatively, if you don’t live in the U.S., check out the Skoda Karoq. It absolutely dominated the roller test, even if it was held by a single fatal flaw — Volkswagen’s continued refusal to let U.S. Americans buy any Skoda products.