Hyundai Says XRT Is Going to Be a ‘Truly Capable’ Off-Road Performance Label

Hyundai’s seen the success of the Ford Bronco, Jeep Wrangler, and Toyota 4Runner and it wants some of that. The South Korean automaker’s about to get serious with body-on-frame vehicles and off-road capability.

At the 2025 Los Angeles Auto Show on Thursday, Olabisi Boyle, who is the senior vice president of product planning and mobility strategy at Hyundai North America, told The Drive that the automaker’s XRT trim is “not gonna be a trim,” and the products coming are going to be “100%” more capable than what’s on showroom floors right now. Hyundai’s hungry for a slice of the adventure and off-road market segment.

“We’re bringing that true (off-road) capability and hardware to our vehicles going forward,” Boyle said.

Today, XRT-badged models are a trim in model lineups. Typically the XRTs add some body cladding, all-terrain tires, recovery hooks on some models, and maybe a thin skid plate or two. Boyle said going forward XRT is “not gonna be a trim. It’s gonna be capability.”

“We are going to be truly capable vehicles, and I won’t say how we’re going to make that happen.” Boyle noted that each iteration of the XRT lineup has expanded on capabilities and features. But a lot of that has been limited by platforms used. “There are different platforms that can be used to make it that tend to perform from a capability standpoint. More robustly than others, and we’re considering those.”

“We actually did already announce the body-and-frame pickup,” Boyle noted. “So we have other platforms. You can do more with a body on frame platform than you can do with unibody or monocoque. sometimes they call it in our company. And that is allowing us a lot of opportunities. That’s the enabler.”

Hyundai’s not alone. Honda’s coming for Subaru and Jeep’s lunch with an off-road pivot that will see more capable TrailSport models seeing the light of day. Meanwhile, the Nissan Xterra is returning and the automaker’s even indicating the Pathfinder will switch back to a body-on-frame chassis.

Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the body-on-frame Hyundai pickup is aiming to tackle the Jeep Gladiator and the automaker might even spin off a body-on-frame SUV all while we are about to get an XRT sub brand. We’ll be watching as this develops.

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