We drove from our home in southeast Michigan to Fort Collins, Colorado and rented a 2026 Hyundai Tuscon for the trip. Our 2013 GMC Terrain has too many miles on it for us to want to pile on thousands more in a matter of weeks, and renting enables me to experience some of the latest vehicle technology.
The amount of new technology can be overwhelming, and I imagine that can be concerning for someone renting a car. Many of the new technology features are standard and enabled in these cars such that if you hop in and drive off you are going to encounter them almost immediately. For example, our Terrain has a lane assist feature that monitors whether when I am driving and touching either the center or side lines on the road and emits an audible beep if I do, but I can turn that feature on or off with a button on the steering wheel. Lane assist in the Tuscon literally turns the steering wheel away from the lines and provides haptic feedback, and that feature is on by default. Nearly immediately one encounters this assistance and having never experienced it wonder what is going on. One cannot turn the Tuscon’s lane assist off with a button, instead you have to navigate the vehicle’s settings to disable the feature.
After I got home from the rental office I spent more than an hour reading through the owner’s manual. One cannot spend that much time in the parking lot at the rental office. I would think these features would be disabled by default for rentals as to not be so overwhelming for customers.
Regardless of the uncomfortable “out of the box” experience I had driving the Tuscon, I have found most of its features indispensable for long road trips, and I know I will wish our Terrain has them the next time I take a long drive with it. The most desirable of the features, in my opinion, is the smart cruise control. Using sensors on the front of the vehicle, the cruise control detects vehicles in front of you and slows down to maintain a specified distance. When you change lanes to pass the cruise control speeds up to the set speed unless there is a car in front.
Driving assistance tries to keep the care in the middle between the side and center road markings. It’s a feature that in this car one can turn on/off with button on the steering wheel, and I turned it off whenever I encountered construction. The car monitors for whether your hands are on the steering wheel while driving assistance is turned on and nags you after a period of time. As I often drive with one hand on the steering wheel during straight stretches of the road, I found this nag to be annoying. You feel the steering wheel move on its own while driving assistance is on, which takes getting used to, and it feels much more abrupt than when doing the same thing manually. Because there are many long straight stretches in Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri, I used driving assistance a lot.
The Tuscon does not have a built-in GPS like our Terrain, instead it relies on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. It was my first experience using Android Auto, which I liked but found it frustrating when it did not connect. When the phone to car connection is the only form of electronic navigation, one needs the connection to be reliable. Many times I had to delete the Bluetooth pairing and re-create it in order to get Android Auto to work. When I tried connecting the phone to the car using USB I got an error message on the phone saying the software on the car was not current and refused to connect, making a more reliable physical connection not an option.
On the morning of the last day it would not connect no matter what I tried and so we drove off without using it until at a rest area later in the morning I checked Google Play for whether there was a recent update that I could roll back only to find a new update waiting, which I installed and that resolved the problem.
I know that at least GM has announced moving back to providing their own navigation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others do too because connecting a phone, which would be ideal particularly for rentals because it enables one to bring their own familiar software, is too unreliable.
Thirteen years separate the Tuscon from our Terrain and the technology changes were significant and mostly useful. I most wish for the smart cruise control as that would make my twice a year trips around Lake Michigan more pleasant of a drive. The Tuscon’s performance is also better, and I think the automatic transmission was configured to push higher RPMs before changing gears, which can provide more power and the expense of lower fuel mileage, but still the Tuscon’s MPG was in the thirties going at 70+ mph the Terrain is at best in the mid 20s.
I found no reason to not buy a Tuscon if the right opportunity presented, though when we do shop for our next car will be doing more research before making a decision.
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Notes From The Cave 