santa fe diesel?

Would like to know please:
1. Is Santa Fe diesel sold in Thailand?

2. Is Santa Fe diesel available on special order in the USA?

3. Is a GPS navigation system available for Santa Fe?

4. Comments generally about reliability / quality of Santa Fe.

(Thinking about buying 2 of them.)

Thank you very much.

 

1. I have no idea what's available in Thailand. (Sorry.)

2. The diesel is not available in the U.S. For 2004, the available
engines are the 2.4 4cyl, and the 2.7 and 3.5 V6. All are gasoline
engines.

3. I see no GPS available through Hyundai in the U.S.

4. I think Santa Fe reliability has been adequate for the 2.7V6. The 2.4
4cyl. has more problems and eats timing belts for lunch. The 3.5 hasn't
been around for long enough for me to gather much of an opinion.

 

Do you know why the diesel engine it's not available? I would be very
interested, I was recently in Europe and basically every car above mini
sized is a diesel. I drove one for two weeks, it was amazingly smooth
and powerful (a 1.8 Turbo Diesel) and went for over 750 km with a tank.

Huynday's were almost ALL diesel there, so it would just be a matter of
importing a few and see if people buy it. Why don't they do it? It
baffles me.

 

Probably market research already done by the (former) big three. Remember
when GM tried diesels? Tanked big time. Of course, the only issue wasn't
lack of public acceptance, but these diesels were so bad, nearly the entire
public knew not to buy one. Toyota tried it in the Camry in the mid 80's.
Almost no one bought one. Personally, I have no problems with diesels in
general, but the public won't purchase enough to make offering that
powertrain cost effective.

 

A car manufacturer would not bring in a few vehicles to test the
market because they would then have to train their techs to service it
as well as warehouse parts for the diesel engines.

Here in Canada, VW sell many diesels. About 40% of their sales are
diesels. People like them because of the great mpg and also diesel is
quite a bit cheaper to buy. In our area there is about 15 cents a
litre price spread.
Bob