Hyundai Tucson

The 2027 Tucson Copies Tesla's Screen and Keeps the Buttons

A familiar layout

Nobody had to squint to see it: vehicle status on the left, maps and apps on the right, a dock of favorites along the bottom. The Fast Lane Car called it "very much a Tesla-like setup" and found nothing to apologize for in the borrowing. Edmunds Cars noted that the Hyundai's screen outsizes a Model Y's and counted the likeness in its favor, while for Redline Reviews the 17-inch panel ranked as the biggest in the segment, with one concession — "Some may say that this is a little bit too big" — answered at once by pointing to the switches below. In all three accounts, the buttons arrived as the reassurance.

Best in class, provisionally

Kirk Kreifels went furthest. From the driver's seat he pronounced Pleos the fastest system he had seen, well ahead of Toyota's newest, and, tallying a preliminary score of 89 out of 100, marked the software "best in class." The same walkaround supplied its own footnotes: auto climate, sync and the heated steering wheel had moved into the screen, the vents had been pushed low to make room for it, and the voice assistant went untried for want of a phone signal in the studio. "I'm still learning how to do all this," he said, some minutes before the score.

The one who shrugged

Only TheStraightPipes made the comparison without making it a compliment. The screen looked larger than the job required — "this is kind of unnecessary" — and the settings kept unfolding: "there's so many more menus." Asked to lower a window, the Gleo assistant heard the request and refused it on safety grounds, then failed again by the voice button, in a prototype that had not been fully switched on. His summary: "You can't have a car in 2027 without something saying AI." Speed was granted freely: no lag, better than Volvo or Polestar at first glance. On Hyundai's own app store the doubt ran deeper, since somebody still has to write the apps.

What the dials are for

Autogefuhl, filming the European car, never mentioned Tesla at all. The software was traced instead to Kia's PV5 and PV7 vans, judged quicker than what came before, and named as the part of the car owners would need time with. His reassurance came from the same place as everyone else's, only stated more plainly: the manual dials remain, so the screen can be left alone, and phone mirroring remains too — "most of us will probably nowadays use that." No other voice on the panel said as directly what the buttons are for.