#NNPA BlackPress
AUTO REVIEW: 2019 Hyundai Santa Fe Ultimate 2.0T
NNPA NEWSWIRE — “…the Santa Fe crossover that I test drove had a bolder design, new safety, comfort and convenience technology, and better sight lines and cabin storage space. All of that is a long winded way of saying the Santa Fe has been reworked for the better.”
By Frank S. Washington, AboutThatCar.com
DETROIT – There have been some big changes for the 2019 Hyundai Santa Fe. The five-passenger Santa Fe Sport is now called Santa Fe. The current long wheelbase three-row, seven-passenger model called Santa Fe has been renamed Santa Fe XL. And an all-new three-row, eight-passenger SUV is currently under development and will carry an all-new name.
What’s more, the Santa Fe crossover that I test drove had a bolder design, new safety, comfort and convenience technology, and better sight lines and cabin storage space. All of that is a long winded way of saying the Santa Fe has been reworked for the better.
The first thing I noticed about the 2019 Santa Fe was the quiet smoothness of the engine. Its ride was silky, much like an all-round air suspension. Instead, the 2019 Santa Fe had a multi-link with gas shock absorber and 24 mm stabilizer bar w/self-leveling suspension.
I had the top-of-the-line 2.0-liter direct injected turbocharged four cylinder engine that made 235 horsepower and 260 pound-feet of torque at a low 1,450 rpms. In other words, the Santa Fe 2.0T could get up and move from just about any speed. It had an EPA rating of 19 mpg in the city, 24 mpg on the highway and 19 mpg combined.
The engine was mated to an all-new eight-speed automatic transmission. Despite having two extra gears, the new eight-speeder, which was designed in-house, was lighter than the outgoing six-speed model. The automatic transmission added ratio range at both the top and bottom of output speeds allowing for extra thrust off-the-line and a quieter, more fuel-efficient dash down the interstate.
My test vehicle had an all-wheel-drive system that Hyundai called advanced. It was developed as a multi-mode scheme that provided an electronic, variable-torque-split clutch with active torque control between the front and rear axles.
The 2019 Santa Fe had an overview camera and a stop start system that was so smooth I never turned it off because of irritation. That’s rare.
The driver-selectable normal, sport and smart drive modes aided traction control in all weather conditions. Given that we got bunches of snow, followed by warmer temperatures and the accompanying slush and wet pavement and then followed by refreezing during the test drive, I left the drive mode in smart and I don’t think there was even any wheel slippage much less wheel spin.
Still, I could sense the slick ride, comfort, handling and stability of the 2019 Santa Fe. Hyundai said they were achieved through a change in suspension geometry. The major adjustment came when engineers moved the rear shocks from an angled position to upright, improving the ride and handling no matter the driving conditions.
The Santa Fe featured Hyundai’s cascading grille and composite light design with LED daytime running lights positioned on top of the LED headlights. The midsize crossover had a wide stance and it looked athletic. Hyundai keeps calling the Santa Fe an SUV but I’m not sure it can go off-road.
Its character line went from headlights to taillights and what the automaker called a daylight opening with satin surround that provided better visibility. I called it windows. There was also diamond cut 19-inch wheels. The rear featured a muscular high and taut shape. There was also a panoramic sun roof that of course never got used but I did let the shade back.
Except for the panoramic roof most of the descriptive stuff I pulled from the Santa Fe’s press material. When you are cleaning snow off a vehicle, you’re not checking character lines, trust me.
But the Santa Fe’s interior was quiet, stately and posh. It was like looking at snow, ice and windblown elements through the window from the cozy surroundings of a den. There was even the feel of a fireplace. Well, okay, that might be a bit much. But it was comfortable.
The 2019 Hyundai Santa Fe had a floating touch infotainment screen. Climate controls were underneath it and there were USB, auxiliary and 12 volt jacks and sockets beneath that along the back wall of a small storage bin at the start of the center console.
A large circular TFT speedometer dominated the space in front of the driver. It had digital speed readout within it. The fuel and temperature readouts were combination TFT and analogue gauges on either side. There was also a heads-up-display. Overall this was an uncluttered look.
This 2019 Santa Fe could be locked into four-wheel-drive. It also had a hill descent control which I thought laughable since this area is about as flat as a billiard table. But other parts of the country have hills and mountains galore.
Anyway, I climbed into the backseat and was really surprised. First, there wasn’t much of a drop off in the quality of the rear seats. They were comfortable and maintained the sleek styling of the front seats.
They were also heated and the panoramic roof covered the rear seats as well. There were privacy shades on the side windows and the green house had an airy feel because of the expansive windows.
And those seats were movable — manually. They slide forward and the backs tilted. They were also 60/40 split seats. There was a latch on the back cargo floor. I pulled it and it revealed three cargo bins under the floor.
Hyundai engineers did a number of little things to enhance the driver and rider experience. The audio/visual/navigation system screen had been tilted and positioned to reduce glare. The window switches and grab handles had been moved forward for more elbow room. The door map pockets had been reduced in size for more legroom and cup holders in the center console had been re-positioned for ease of use and the height and length of the center armrest has also been increased. None of this stuff would you necessarily notice but it makes the experience more satisfying.
There was the usual equipment. These days that includes blind spot monitoring, rear cross traffic alert, implicit is a rearview camera, smart cruise control, satellite radio, Bluetooth, premium audio system, etc.
What impressed me most was the back seat monitor reminding me to check back there every time I got out of the vehicle and the oncoming traffic alert. This wasn’t traffic from in front but vehicles from there rear. If I parked on a busy street and unlatched the door to exit, it would alert me if traffic was coming.
It was a well-equipped crossover and Hyundai continues to hold on to its DNA of offering more for the money; I thought the $39,905 sticker as tested was a pretty good price for the 2019 Santa Fe Ultimate 2.0T.
Pros:
- Lots of equipment
- Great price: $39,905
- Good ride and handling
Cons:
- Mileage less than 20 in the city
- Only front doors have pushbutton unlock
- No fully automatic power windows in rear
Frank S. Washington is editor of AboutThatCar.com
#NNPA BlackPress
PRESS ROOM: Top Climate Organizations React to Trump’s Executive Orders Attacking Health, Environment, Climate and Clean Energy Jobs
NNPA NEWSWIRE — Climate Action Campaign (CAC), along with partners and allies, voiced strong concerns about the executive orders and the confirmation of Lee Zeldin as the 17th Environmental Protection Agency administrator.

Voice concerns about the New EPA Administrator
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump wasted no time implementing the Project 2025 playbook. Within his first hours as the 47th President, he issued executive orders aimed at dismantling crucial climate, health, and economic protections, which could have dire consequences for the country and the environment. His actions of disservice to our communities on the first day of his presidency coincided with Martin Luther King Jr. Day which was meant for service and reflection. The policies introduced by President Trump, along with his new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, stand in stark contrast to the spirit of Dr. King’s commitments to service others and improve society.
Climate Action Campaign (CAC), along with partners and allies, voiced strong concerns about the executive orders and the confirmation of Lee Zeldin as the 17th Environmental Protection Agency administrator. “The new administration has moved to undo hard-earned generational progress like Justice40 that was created to ensure every American has an opportunity to be healthy and thrive,” said Dr. Margo Browne, Senior Vice President of Justice and Equity, at Environmental Defense Fund. “These actions threaten the rights of tens of millions of Americans to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and use products free of toxic chemicals, particularly those people whose zip code or race add undue burdens.
We must stay focused. Leaders change, but our work remains the same. And we will do everything we can to uphold the progress made with our partners and allies and to uplift the people on the frontlines fighting for equity every day.” “As we enter into an era of weaponized phrases and issues, we must remember that environmental justice means that all people should have equitable access to a healthy, sustainable, and resilient environment,” said Leslie Fields, Chief Federal Officer, WE ACT For Environmental Justice. “Trump’s day one acts – including rescissions of nearly 80 vital executive orders while adding dozens of new, anti-democratic orders – roll back popular policies that promote clean, renewable, and affordable energy. These actions also place vulnerable communities in even greater danger from pollution and the dire, real-time consequences of the climate crisis. In the face of these assaults, we will not stop pursuing justice.”
“The President of the United States is elected to lead and protect all Americans,” said Ben Jealous, Executive Director, Sierra Club. “Donald Trump promised to be a president who fights for working families, but his bluster of action shows he’s fighting harder to protect corporate polluters and their profits, all at the expense of our health, our safety, and our jobs. The American people want cheaper energy bills, safe drinking water, and clean air. Donald Trump should listen and offer actual solutions instead of exploiting their pain for political gain while he further lines the pockets of the wealthiest instead of American workers.”
On the Confirmation of Lee Zeldin, 17th administrator of the EPA:
“Lee Zeldin’s confirmation as EPA administrator is a catastrophic blow to the health of Americans, the climate, and the economy,” said Margie Alt, Director, Climate Action Campaign. “Under Zeldin’s leadership, the Environmental Protection Agency will no longer protect the American people and our communities – it will protect polluters. Zeldin’s public statements and record make it clear he will implement Trump’s anti-science, anti-clean energy Project 2025 agenda, prioritizing the interests of oil and gas CEOs at the expense of the clean air, water, and energy that Americans overwhelmingly support and rely on. Americans deserve an EPA administrator who will prioritize the health and safety of families over polluter profits. Zeldin’s confirmation is a tragic failure for all Americans.”
“The new head of the EPA must ensure that neither he nor the President denies vulnerable communities their most basic rights—the right to breathe clean air, drink water free from poison, and live on land that does not make them sick,” said Mustafa Santiago Ali, Executive Vice President, National Wildlife Federation. “Environmental Justice is not a privilege; it is the foundation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To neglect it is to abandon the people who need protection the most.” “Confirming a director who normalizes baseless conspiracies, while failing to earnestly accept the facts of climate change, is a threat to the health of everyone in the United States and especially the most vulnerable Justice 40 communities,” said KeShaun Pearson, Executive Director, Memphis Community Against Pollution. “Lee Zeldin is the antithesis of environment and climate justice. We are amid a climate crisis that demands a protector, not a big oil pawn.” Climate Action Campaign is a vibrant coalition of advocacy organizations working together to drive ambitious, durable federal action to cut carbon pollution, address the climate crisis, advance environmental justice, and accelerate the transition to clean energy.
#NNPA BlackPress
BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2025 We Proclaim It
NNPA NEWSWIRE — In the history of this country, in the ongoing fight against racial oppression, against a white supremacist narrative, and against the racial apartheid laws that were passed and upheld, there have always been gear-shifting moments when individual people have taken a stand.

By Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead
Former Georgia Representative Julian Bond and Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver once said that when Rosa Parks chose to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, somewhere in the universe, a gear in the machinery shifted, and everything changed.
A gear-shifting moment.
In the history of this country, in the ongoing fight against racial oppression, against a white supremacist narrative, and against the racial apartheid laws that were passed and upheld, there have always been gear-shifting moments when individual people have taken a stand. It happened in 1850, when Harriet Araminta Tubman, a year after her self-emancipation, chose to go back to Baltimore, Maryland, to help lead her niece and her niece’s two children to freedom. A gear shifted. It happened in 1770, when Crispus Attucks, a Black and Indigenous sailor and whaler, chose to get involved with the growing kerfuffle in Boston. In 1864, when the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops marched from Camp William Penn through the streets of Philadelphia on their way to fight, gear shifted.
When Mamie Till told them in 1955 to leave her son’s casket open so that the world could see what those white men had done to her son, a gear in the machinery of the universe shifted, it happened again in 1966 with Kwame Ture and Mukasa Dada’s declaration of Black Power after the “March Against Fear.” In 2014, after police officers killed unarmed Eric Garner in New York and unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Black people came together under the banner and hashtag of Black Lives Matter to march, protest, and demand change. Gears shift when we choose to fight, when we choose to stand up, and when we refuse to back down. The moral arc of the universe does not bend on its own toward justice, it bends because we push it and because we are willing to continue to do it until change does happen.
In 1926, when Dr. Carter G. Woodson—the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the son of formerly enslaved parents, a former sharecropper and miner, and the second Black person to receive a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University—sent out a press release announcing the first Negro History Week, a gear shifted. He chose February because the Black community was already celebrating the historic achievements on the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (2/12) and Frederick Douglass (2/14). Dr. Woodson did not wait for the celebration of our history to be proclaimed, he proclaimed it. He did not wait for someone to permit him to celebrate what we had contributed to this country, he celebrated it. Dr. Woodson understood that Black parents had been teaching their children our history since we arrived in this country. Our stories and achievements had been carried by the wind and buried in the soil. It had been whispered as bedtime stories, spoken from the pulpits on Sunday mornings, and woven throughout our songs and poems of resistance and survival. America did not have to tell us who we were to this country; we told them.
[This post contains video, click to play]
America did not have to tell us that we built this country, our fingerprints are etched into the stone. America does not have to proclaim Black History Month, we proclaim it. We live in the legacy of Dr. Woodson, and as we have done for 98 years, we will celebrate who we are and all that we have accomplished. We stand at the intersection of the past and the future; what we do at this moment will determine how the next gear shifts. The 2025 Black History Month theme is African Americans and Labor, which focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people and the transformational work that we have done throughout the U.S., Africa, and the Diaspora. We are celebrating our visible labor—from the work we did back then to build the White House to the work we do right now to hold the White House accountable, from repairing the roads to teaching in our schools, from stocking shelves to packing and unloading trucks; from working in the federal government to our ongoing labor in the state and local offices—and, our invisible labor—from raising and teaching our children to caring for our aging family members, from finding ways to practice revolutionary self-care to finding ways to hope beyond hope in a country that frequently targets and terrorizes Black people. We bear witness to what it means to work hard every day and to get sick and tired of working so hard.
As the president of ASALH, one of the many legacy keepers of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, I am excited to proclaim and uplift the start of Black History Month 2025. I believe that ASALH is a lighthouse that you do not notice until you need it. When boats are caught in a storm or fog, they look for the lighthouse to help guide them safely back to the shore. We have been standing as a lighthouse proudly proclaiming the importance of Black History and helping people to understand that it is only through studying the quilted narrative of our historical journey that one can see the silences, blind spots, hypocrisies, and distortions of American history. We do not celebrate because we are given permission, we celebrate because we are the permission givers. We do not wait for Black History Month to be proclaimed, we proclaim it. We do not wait to be seen, we see ourselves. We do not have to be told the story of America because we are writing it, we are telling it, we are owning it, and we are pointing the way to it. We invite you to join us as we once again celebrate and center the incredible contributions that Black people have made to this beautiful and imperfect nation.
Dr. Karsonya (Kaye) Wise Whitehead is the 30th person and the eighth woman to serve as the national president of ASALH. She is a professor of Communication and African and African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland and the host of the award-winning radio show “Today with Dr. Kaye” on WEAA, 88.9 FM. She is the author of the recently released “my mother’s tomorrow: dispatches from Baltimore’s Black Butterfly” and a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. She lives in Baltimore with her family.
#NNPA BlackPress
Black Reaction to Trump DEI Blame on The Plane Crash
NNPA NEWSWIRE — Before the completed investigation officially began, President Trump laid the blame for the accident on the Army helicopter. He felt it should have been flying at a different altitude, higher or lower, than the jet

By April Ryan
“We are dealing with a vicious adversary,” according to Rev. Al Sharpton, the head of the National Action Network speaking of President Donald Trump and his hate diatribe Thursday morning. President Trump blamed DEI, the Obama and Biden administrations along with former Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg for the deadly midair crash over the Potomac last night. 67 people died after an accident between an American Airline Plane and an Army Helicopter. When asked why President Trump thought diversity had something to do with the crash, he said,” I have common sense and most people don’t.” Reverend Al, who is investigating the impact of the Trump anti-DEI efforts in retail believes Trump is “obsessed with race” and he is a “raw, insensitive, uncaring man.”
Former Secretary Buttigieg immediately went to social media making a statement saying, Trump should be leading, not lying.” Buttigieg also fact-checked Trump saying we grew Air Traffic Control and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.” Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) / X During Trump’s rant on DEI at the White House briefing room podium, he asserted, “the FAA’s diversity push includes a focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. That is amazing. And then it says, the FAA says, people with severe disabilities, the most underrepresented segment of the workforce, and they want them in, and they want them. They can be air traffic controllers. I don’t think so.” Trump went on to say the prior administrations felt those departments were “too white.”
According to reports FAA staffing has been an issue since Inauguration Day January 20, 2025. Also, Elon Musk, the head of the White House Office of Government Efficiency is reported to have asked the head of the FAA to resign. Musk FAA Ax Former Black Obama Administration Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx exclusively told this reporter after the Trump statements,” I would caution against any definitive conclusions until that work [investigation] is done by trained, experienced professionals.”
Foxx, who also worked as a transportation consultant in the Biden administration admonished the Trump address saying, “There is no sugar-coating the tragic midair collision that occurred last night. In my experience, safety has always been the number one focus of the Federal Aviation Administration.” Foxx says there is a safety mission to be completed after this tragedy. “There is a well-practiced root cause process that has been taken in the past. It should be used now with competent professionals. A comprehensive, fact-based investigation will answer the many questions we all have. It would also help guard against future accidents of this type,” according to the transportation expert.
Before the completed investigation officially began, President Trump laid the blame for the accident on the Army helicopter. He felt it should have been flying at a different altitude, higher or lower, than the jet. When it comes to the president’s corrosive comments, reaction has been swift from the civil rights community. In a statement from the President and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Derrick Johnson, “The NAACP is disgusted by this display of unpresidential, divisive behavior.” Johnson told this reporter in a text message, “The President has made his decision to put politics over people abundantly clear as he uses the highest office in the land to sow hatred rooted in falsehoods instead of providing us with the leadership we need and deserve.”
As Trump worked to distract with his words on DEI, the questions still abound as to what caused the deadly plane crash. Former Sec. Foxx, immediately following the fatal crash last night said. “My worst fear is that something happened with the avionics. I hope and expect that this is not the case. But most aircraft these days run in a form of GPS. Could a warning system have failed? But then, how can two systems fail? That leads to some even more grave concerns about interference with the systems. There are many other potential causes.”
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