The new EV9 finds itself rubbing shoulders with luxury large SUVs from Land Rover and Audi. So will buyers really pay £75k for the Kia? Matt Saunders puts it to the test
PHOTOGRAPHY JACK HARRISON
Premium’ is an unhelpfully vague term to apply to a car, when you think about it. A premium is something you pay, but you don’t – these days, at any rate – pay it for its own sake.
Audi, Mercedes, BMW and Land Rover could all be described as premium brands. But that descriptor would actually tell you little about what these brands trade on in 2024, and how different they are. Audi remains a design brand; once-luxury-minded Mercedes has become more of a technology brand; BMW is a sporting brand; while Land Rover is all about capability and versatility. We could go on.
And so for brands like Kia with premium aspirations, sooner or later you must decide what kind of ‘premium’ you want to be. Looking back over a decade or so, it is easy to spot the evidence of the company trying things on. Giving neat-and-tidy refined premium design a go (with the previous Sportage and Ceed), and then moving to more bold and outlandish design (current Sportage, EV6). But also dallying with sporting dynamism and driver appeal, and even with an alternative executive saloon along the way (EV6 GT, Stinger GT).
Now it is trying something different again – and this might be its most interesting aspirational experiment yet. Because, while better known for big cars elsewhere in the world than it is in Europe, Kia has never – into any market – launched a car quite like the EV9.
More than five metres long, with genuinely arresting design, a really spacious seven-seat cabin and an all-electric powertrain easily strong enough to count as a selling point in its own right, this unashamedly full-size SUV will take Kia into buying conversations in which it has never come close to featuring before. It is, according to its maker, already attracting customers who are trading in Range Rover Sports, Cayennes, X5s and XC90s.
And so a welcoming party including an electric Audi Q8 E-tron on the one hand and a Land Rover Defender plug-in hybrid on the other ought to help us decipher precisely what kind of upscale electric family car this company has just pulled from its magical hat. The Kia of five or six years ago might, I reckon, have given us a big electric SUV much more like the Audi: sleek, attractive, but mostly modern-crossover-conventional in its design, with a more textbook luxury car interior
