Eye-catching flagship electric SUV offers seats for seven and a long official range On sale Now Price from £64,995
Will Nightingale will.nightingale@haymarket.com
NOWADAYS THERE’S AN electric SUV to suit just about everyone – unless, that is, you want to carry around seven people in comfort. Sure, the Mercedes-Benz EQB has enough seats for the job, but adults in the third row really won’t relish a road trip. Well, the Kia EV9 is here to shake up the status quo. It’s the biggest car the Korean brand has ever sold in the UK, it’s available with a choice of six or seven seats, and it looks like nothing else on the road.
Let’s start with those looks, because earlier this year you voted the EV9 the car you were most looking forward to seeing in 2023. Indeed, it racked up more than three times as many votes as anything else. That was based on photos of a prototype, but the overall aesthetic has barely changed at all for the real thing.
At just over five metres long, the EV9 is about the same size as an Audi Q7, so around 20cm longer and 8cm taller than Kia’s existing hybrid seven-seat SUV, the Sorento. It’s the third-row passengers who’ll benefit most from the EV9’s sizeable dimensions; even six-footers will find plenty of head room. There’s more than enough knee room, too – as long as those in the second row haven’t slid their seats right back.
And they won’t need to, because knee room for that row is, frankly, ridiculous – no matter whether you go for the standard seven-seat layout, with its conventional three-seat second-row bench, or the optional six-seat configuration. The latter swaps the middle row for two individual chairs, which can swivel 180 degrees, allowing occupants the choice of facing forwards or backwards. Setting these to a 90-degree angle makes it easy to get kids in and out of child seats, whichever seating layout you go for (the EV9 has four Isofix mounts in total – two on the second row and two on the third).
Even with all of the seats in use, the EV9 has a slightly bigger boot than a Toyota Yaris, and when you need more space for luggage, the third and second-row seatbacks can be folded down electrically. In two-seat mode, the boot is so cavernous that the EV9 is essentially transformed into a funky-looking van.
Kia’s interiors have been getting better and better over the years, and we’d go so far as to say the EV9 is the brand’s best effort yet. Not by much, though, and the materials used inside don’t impress compared with those in premium five-se
