One major issue here is that the Santa Fe is a front wheel drive 4000lbs SUV. Even with the AWD package, by nature it is still a FWD SUV. This poses several problems and with 276HP under the hood the FWD setup is already taxed 26HP more than what is considered acceptable for a FWD drive train. If this was a real setup (RWD plus AWD) these issues would be eliminated altogether and you could drop 1000HP under the hood and still track in a straight line. The biggest problem here is cost cutting. To make a $38K fully loaded SUV there are lots of sacrifices to be made in quality (trust me, I traded my MB CLK in for my Santa Fe and quality is definitely lacking in this cute-ute). And one the biggest savings is dropping a FWD drivetrain into a truck and using a part-time AWD system. It gets the job done and most customers of this demographic have no idea of the sacrifices in build/quality anyway and the only competitors in this price range are the other cute-utes like the rav4. The heavy hitters like the MB GLK or Infinity Fx35 are $10k to $20k higher to start.

It is what it is unfortunately. It is a cute little SUV on budget that offers a lot for a little. It's just something that has to taken with a grain of salt. Or just buy the 4cyl version instead and torque steer will be minimal.