2021 Hyundai Palisade Long-Term Update | Super smooth sailing

Our 2021 Hyundai Palisade has been a road trip warrior throughout the warmer months of the year. It’s been to North Carolina and back a couple of times, to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and even eastward to Central New York.

All of these trips are causing the miles to pile up, so we had to get our Palisade in for its first scheduled maintenance at a local dealership. Unfortunately, it was more difficult than usual to get that appointment. Our local Hyundai dealer simply told us that it was experiencing more service calls than normal, so our wait to get the car in would be longer than is traditional. To illustrate that for you, we made the phone call with about 7,000 miles on the clock (500 miles before the recommended 7,500-mile service), and the odometer was reading over 9,000 miles at the time of our appointment. In days and weeks, it was nearly a full month between scheduling our appointment and the actual appointment time.

Guess it’s not just new cars and trucks that are in short supply, but service appointments, too.

How long it took to get our Palisade in is one of the biggest complaints we’ve had in our first six months, though. This service call is the only trip to the dealership our Palisade’s made yet, as absolutely nothing has gone wrong so far. That’s just as it should be for a brand-new car with only 9,000 miles on the odometer, but it’s not always the case.

The appointment itself went off without a hitch once there. We paid our $90 bill after the work was complete. This included an oil change, tire rotation, a fuel additive (that you definitely don’t need) and a multi-point inspection. Everything turned up positive with the inspection, so we were sent on our way with a freshly-washed Palisade.

None of us (your author included) have had much bad to say about the Palisade in its first 9,000 miles. One of our editors even went and bought a Palisade Calligraphy in the same spec for his own family. After spending a month in our long-termer and a few months in a personal Palisade, his biggest complaints amount to the lack of a digital rearview mirror, lack of a power tilting/telescoping wheel and the execution of the keyless entry/exit system. Instead of touch sensitive door handles, Hyundai forces you to press a button on the handles to lock or unlock the doors. Woe is us, right?

The stellar driver assistance features continue to shine bright. We’re making great use of the Palisade’s boxy proportions (more on that in a future update). Fuel economy has been up to snuff — we’re regularly beating the EPA-rated 24 mpg highway figure on longer drives by about 1 mpg. And the Calligraphy’s upgraded interior still makes us happy each time we plop down into the quilted leather seats. One note on the interior, though: Don’t smash any mosquitoes into the suede headliner. They might look like an easy kill sitting there, but getting mosquito guts out of cream-colored suede is less enjoyable. And hey, give us a break; we’ve had a mosquito-heavy year in Michigan. Maybe all the flooding is to blame.

Look out in the near future for even more updates on what we’ve been up to with our three-row Hyundai. And let’s hope the next 7,500 miles are as pleasant as the first, because this long-term Palisade is shaping up to be one superb family workhorse in our long-term fleet.

For all of our coverage on our long-term 2021 Hyundai Palisade, make sure to head here to see a compilation of every story and review.

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