Many buyers of full-size pickups have work to do, and a strong truck with a large bed is mission critical. Others just like the feel of a large body-on-frame vehicle around them, content with the knowledge their truck can handle anything from a trip to the hardware store to helping a buddy move a mattress. But full-size trucks keep getting bigger, making them harder to park or fit in a garage, which has led to a resurgence in the popularity of the midsize and compact pickup truck. For many consumers, those smaller lifestyle trucks, like our long-term 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz, are taking the place of a car or SUV as a daily urban driver with truck bed fringe benefits.

Our compact Santa Cruz falls into this latter category; it's a car-based pickup that shares its underpinnings with the Hyundai Tucson compact crossover.

The Santa Cruz is a pickup with a 4.0-foot composite-molded bed with anchor points, adjustable rails with tie-down cleats, and a factory-integrated retractable and lockable hard tonneau cover. Its payload is a not-too-shabby 1,411 pounds for our loaded all-wheel-drive model.

While small, the bed was designed to accommodate 4x8-foot sheets of plywood with the tailgate open. Even with the tailgate up, our truck holds a decent amount of stuff. Four slots are molded into the bed to hold planks to create a second level for loading things, presumably when the cover is open. For a trip north, even with the cover closed, we filled it with bedding, luggage, and assorted household items for a summer vacation.

The tailgate hinge is also damped to make it easier to lift and lower without slamming. Higher trims, like our Santa Cruz SEL Premium, have power remote opening. To better see what you are doing, there are LED lights on each side of the bed and a third pointing down from the roof.

Being a small truck, the Santa Cruz also has a low load height, so it's easier to reach into the bed than more traditionally constructed trucks. Most buyers won't even need the integrated rear corner bumper steps or the two levels of grippy footholds under the tailgate and the license plate, but I appreciated them. Even with the help, I can't reach items that have slid up against the cab.

Of course, you can only pile things so high with a hard tonneau cover. This was an issue for technical director Frank Markus, who was headed to his cabin and found it was a tight squeeze for the plastic storage bins that contained a week's worth of supplies. "It's nice to have a rigid tonneau cover," he said, "but that roll-up feature robs valuable space in the front of the pickup box, which is minimal to begin with. The depth of the bed is not enough to cover the Honda generator we needed to bring up." The tonneau only locks into position in one place—at the half-open mark—but the generator needed more space.

To lock the cover, there is a yellow dial underneath. It is not immediately clear which position is locked and which is unlocked. And it feels like you might break the handle on the top trying to release the clasp and open it. Once released, the cover generally slides easily to open and close; it is even self-retracting at times. But other times it sticks and needs some nudging.

The tonneau looks sturdy and of decent-quality material. But there's a cheap-looking cloth strap hanging from a carabiner clip in the center to pull the cover shut. This leash hangs down in the way of loading when the cover is closed. When the cover opens, the strap is pulled taut—it is used to pull the top closed again. We adjusted the strap, making it long enough to snag a tiedown near the tailgate; this was the only way I could reach it. Before I adjusted the strap, I had to hop onto the tailgate and shimmy up the bed to grab it. Another solution would be to MacGyver a fix: attach Velcro to the strap and to the underside of the tonneau within reach of the side.

Markus found another good use for the strap: He tied it to the handle of the generator, which secured the tonneau above the forward part of the bed. The tailgate locks provide additional security for the bed. Even with the awkwardness, Markus was quick to conclude that the pickup was a better option than a similar-sized SUV. "I would not have wanted to transport a generator filled with gasoline—not to mention the gas can to refill it—in a closed SUV."

In another nod to its car and SUV roots, the truck has a hidden and lockable in-bed trunk with a built-in drain plug. The trunk extends almost the width of the truck, but the space is shallow. It's perfect for smaller items like sheets and camera bags. It can also handle four or five grocery bags laid down like swaddled quintuplets, and it keeps goods cool and dry, even if the bed is left open. There are no cargo nets or tiedowns; the space is tight enough that items sliding around will rarely be an issue.

The trunk can be accessed with the tonneau in place, but it's slightly restrictive—and you have to move large items in the bed, like Frank's generator, onto the tailgate temporarily to get at the extra storage.

A similar system on the Honda Ridgeline is larger and more usable—in part because the Ridgeline's bed is 9 inches longer, and because of the side-opening tailgate. The Ridgeline in-bed trunk offers 7.3 cubic feet of storage; the Santa Cruz offers about 40 percent as much. And the similarly sized Ford Maverick has a deeper and taller bed.

The Santa Cruz has small storage cubbies on each side of the bed to stash work gloves or tiedown straps so they don't bounce around. One of them can be outfitted with a 115-volt power outlet, which is handy.

And if all of the above isn't enough, there's more storage under the back seat, and the side rails on the roof can accommodate roof racks.

The bottom line is the Santa Cruz has the functionality of a truck and the carlike ride of an SUV. In testing we found our long-termer, with its 282-hp, 311-lb-ft, 2.5-liter turbocharged I-4 engine, went from 0 to 60 mph in 6.0 seconds. Our midgrade long-termer was quicker than the loaded one we tested in California, which required 6.3 seconds. The quarter mile required 14.5 seconds, less than the 14.9 seconds on the previous tester. We are starting to think the Santa Cruz, despite its name, likes Michigan better than California. It's a theory we have many more months to test.