Automakers aren’t perfect. Hold on, before you slap me, just hear me out: Quality control is generally damn good among modern carmakers, but mistakes still happen. Thankfully, they’re usually not big, dangerous mistakes, but more often something minor — and I suppose a bit embarrassing. Something like the thing that’s wrong with this 2022 Hyundai Tucson.

We were sent these photos by someone who works at a dealership, and I’ve taken the liberty of obscuring some of the background and other identifying elements to eliminate any unwanted blowback. But everything about the vehicle itself is unchanged.

See if you can spot what’s wrong with this 2022 Hyundai Tucson from these images:

Front quarter: The new ones look good! Hyundai is doing interesting things with camouflaging the lighting into the grille lately.

I can see a hint of the issue here.

...and now it’s on full display. Did you catch it?

If not, here, I’ll show you:

That’s not a Santa Fe!

Just to compare, here’s a 2022 Tucson butt and a 2022 Santa Fe rump:

They don’t even look that much alike. Their taillight designs are very different, and the model badges are even on opposite sides of the tailgate.

Checking Hyundai’s site, as you can see on the screenshot from the video walkaround, it looks like the Tucson badge is on the left there. So I guess it’s only reversed on the Euro ones.

Still. It’s the wrong name.

I’ve been to factories and seen how these sorts of adhesive-backed badges are applied; there’s a special jig used to make sure everything is aligned properly, which means that whoever slapped on this Santa Fe badge had to know something wasn’t right, I’d think.

Anyway, this is hardly a debilitating error, and if I were shopping for one of these I’d kind of want the misbadged one just to enjoy the mild confusion I’d sow among gearheads (at least the hyper-alert ones).

Plus, I’d try touse that to get the price down a bit. By like, $20.