Best Mid to Large SUV with Birds Eye view and Blind Spot Monitoring

Ask the Hackrs
1

Hi All,

Who knows of a good year end deal for an SUV for the wife with a birds eye view (to help her park) and blind spot monitoring for everyone else??

2

Santa Fe Sport! Where are you located?

3

In San Diego and Los Angeles area.

4

I Would be interested in the Santa Fe Se Ultimate or Limited Ultimate. I’m in the Inland Empire area in California.

5

Looks like I’m looking for a Santa Fe Sport with Tech Package. Of course this is like a $9k package…

6

We’ve been going through and looking at all the midsized SUVs with birds eye view, and fortunately in 2018 there are a lot more options.

My favorite because of it’s size is the Land Rover Discovery Sport. We rarely need 7 passengers, and it’s always around town with small kids. The camera is great, drive is great. We’re a little concerned with overall quality, but … it’s a lease with a warranty!

The Chevrolet Traverse was the most surprising. On the high end trim, it was comfortable and very well equipped. It’s pretty big, though, for us we felt it was better to just go with a minivan over the Traverse. Best perk here is how big the trunk space is behind the 3rd row.

The Acura MDX is nice, they have a good lounge seat option for 2+2+3 configurations but still suffers from the plague of 6 or 7 passenger mid-sized SUVs: With a third row, there is very little space. Not sure if the Honda Pilot has the birds eye view, but the MDX does with the higher end package (Tech I think).

Highlander Limited Platinum is high on our list. It’s expensive but Honcker had some reasonable offers (which hilariously were about 40% cheaper than the local dealer quote). Drives well.

Volvo XC90 is another option, but feels pretty big. It drives very well, on the higher end seats it is probably the most comfortable seating out of all the cars we looked at – camera was also very good, just under the 2018 Disco Sport.

We prioritized for interior comfort, size (smallest with cargo space as best), ride quality, and price. I think my order here is:

  1. Land Rover Discovery Sport
  2. Volvo XC90
  3. Highlander
  4. Traverse
  5. MDX

We did talk to Kia about the Sorento, it’s one that would jump higher on the list on price but the initial quote was $800/mo which was hilariously absurd. Lower build quality than anything on the list in some areas (especially around the seat latches and levers, moving the seat forward for access to the third row) an equal on others. They didn’t have one with the camera for us to look at the camera quality, so can’t speak to that.

Hope this is helpful!

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