Hyundai takes the Venue into 2026 by making equipment standard further down the range

Hyundai has rolled the Venue over to the 2026 model year, and the change follows the strategy that has kept the car on shortlists since its April 2025 refresh: move equipment down the ladder, leave the engines and the price band alone, and let the variant sheet do the talking. The band is unchanged in MotoSutra’s sample listing at ₹7.94 lakh to ₹13.60 lakh ex-showroom, and nothing mechanical has moved.

That is a deliberate choice with a limit, and Hyundai knows where it is. The Venue’s remaining soft spot is not its equipment list, which was never short, but the three-star adult crash score its structure carries in our catalogue. No model-year re-trim can touch that number, and the Tata and Mahindra alternatives at ₹10-13 lakh keep leading on it. What Hyundai can do is make the case against a rival on the two terms it still controls: pace per rupee, and features per rupee.

What moved down the ladder

Wireless charging and rear AC vents, previously the property of the SX(O) turbo automatic, are now standard from the EX 1.5 upward. The digital instrument cluster arrives on the ₹11.50 lakh SX 1.0 Turbo manual, pairing with the 12.5-inch touchscreen that has been in the car since the last update, and a dual-tone roof is newly optional on the turbo trims. A buyer who previously had to spend ₹13.60 lakh to get the convenience kit now gets most of it at ₹9.05 lakh.

The engines are exactly as carried over, which is worth stating plainly because model-year announcements often hide a recalibration. The 998 cc three-cylinder turbo makes 120 bhp at 5,500 rpm and 172 Nm across 1,500-3,500 rpm, good for a claimed 18 kmpl and a 180 km/h top speed on a 1,210 kg car. The 1.5-litre four-cylinder below it stays at 115 bhp, an engine that asks for more revs and gives back more smoothness at idle. The manual remains light, the automatic stays reserved for the top variant, and both gearboxes suit their engines as before.

A company brief accompanying the launch frames the change as responding to customer feedback collected through test drives, with the rear-vents-and-charger package cited by name; the substance is that Hyundai would rather spend its model-year budget on what buyers touch than on what they read about.

The unchanged arithmetic of choice

The decision inside the Venue range has not moved either. The 1.5 variants remain the sensible city buy: calmer, cheaper to insure, and less than the car’s headline performance figures suggest they should be. The turbo is why anyone cross-shops a sub-four-metre SUV at all — its shove from 1,500 rpm is what our review scores 4.3 out of five for — and the ₹2.10 lakh gap between the SX 1.5 manual and the SX 1.0 Turbo manual is still the cheapest meaningful performance upgrade on this segment’s price sheets.

The limitations are the same list as last year, and a 2026 launch does not repeal them. The boot holds 375 litres, modest against the Sonet’s 392. The rear torsion-beam suspension reports expansion joints to the second row. And at 195 mm of ground clearance the Venue is high enough for Indian roads but not high enough to make the Thar-shaped elephant in the showroom disappear. Against the Skoda Kushaq in our head-to-head, the Venue wins on equipment value and loses on structure; against the Sonet, it loses the equipment tie-break it once held, which is precisely why this re-trim exists.