Kia is moving upmarket with its new seven-passenger EV.
(Bloomberg) — At Bloomberg Pursuits, our mandate is to cover the world of luxury. Which typically does not include Kia.
With prices in the US that range from less than $17,000 for the Rio to $50,000 for the Sorento, and a production volume aimed at satiating the masses rather than the elite, the 79-year-old South Korean brand is not a luxury marque.
But Kia spokespeople have been telling me that the 2024 Kia EV9 SUV is just as good as the Land Rover hybrid SUVs and Rivian R1S electric SUV. That claim raised my eyebrows. So of course I wanted to test it out—and recently I became the first non-employee outside Seoul to do so.
The Kia EV9 is a 16.5-foot-long, seven-passenger, all-electric SUV. It offers many of the same comforts as an SUV from a brand like Land Rover, such as heated and massaging middle seats and 14 speakers of high-end Meridian-brand sound. But it lacks the overall polish of a more expensive offering, such as the electric Mercedes-Benz EQB, which is on sale now and offers an optional third row of seats. The EV9 has a driving range of 300 miles and can charge to 80% of that in around 25 minutes on a DC fast charger. Pricing has yet to be announced.
After a day in Los Angeles doing my best to tax the battery, confuse the infotainment system and max out the storage space, I agree that Kia is onto something with its new electric SUV. While it lacks the image and status of an SUV from a luxury brand, like the upcoming Range Rover and Volvo EX90 EVs, the EV9 proved capable and well executed—and with deliveries scheduled to begin by the end of this year, it will beat them to market.
(If Rivian’s delayed electric R1S is anything like its R1T truck, Kia already has it beat. I’m still waiting on that R1S test drive, Rivian. Change my mind!)
Moving On Up
The first thing I asked the Kia spokesperson who met me with the EV9 in LA’s Beachwood neighborhood was why Hyundai’s luxury brand, Genesis, didn’t make the group’s largest EV. (The largest electric SUV currently available from Genesis, the GV70, seats five.) Hyundai Motor Group owns the Hyundai, Kia and Genesis brands. If the EV9 truly was a gem of a car, why not make it the crown jewel at Genesis?
“Kia is in its own lane right now,” says Jeffrey Jablansky, a Kia spokesperson, noting that Hyundai would stay downmarket and Genesis would always be luxury—the implication being that Kia could dip its toe into both categories. “We’re doing it because Kia deserves to have its own flagship.”
The EV9 is certainly a strong statement for a flagship. It looks like a tank, if the tank had dappled LED headlights across its front and 21-inch block wheels that look like saucers. It weighs “less than” 10,000 pounds, Jablansky says, undercutting the GM Hummer EV’s 9,000 pounds but not by too much, by my guess.
Walking up to it in the parking lot of Beachwood Cafe had me gawking at its high hood and nearly eight inches of ground clearance. The grill, with multiple layers of black plastic covering lasers and road sensors, looked as imposing as something that had rolled out of Transformers. It did not look cheap. And it dwarfed the Mercedes-Benz EQE SUV I had driven earlier that morning.
I climbed inside, admiring the brown and black seat trim done in synthetic leather (real leather trim and wood accents are not available). It wasn’t overly fancy; it lacked such flourishes as the lucite-looking shifter in Polestars or the brushed chrome trim of a Bentley, but it was well done and refreshingly discreet.
I moved to the back to try out the two large pilot chairs in the middle row. They proved more accommodating and spacious than the front seats; they even come standard with extending leg rests, heaters and massagers in the higher trim variants of the SUV. I left the third row of seats laid flat as I found them—I had plans to fill that space later.
Unlike Mercedes-Benz, which integrates its complex entertainment screens within the dashboard, Kia sets its 12.3-inch touchscreen on the dash as if it were gently resting there. It’s a minor but distinct difference that separates the top of the category from the middle—you’ll recognize the tablet style, rather than clever integrated screens, in Tesla and Rivian as well.
The infotainment screens in the EV9 show everything from drive modes (Eco, Normal, Sport, My Drive and Snow) to lasers used for driving systems to the sound levels coming from the radio. A few of the terms describing the functions are confusing (“phone projection” stymied me; it felt like a poor translation from commands in Korean, and I still am not sure what it does). The “passenger talk” system that uses a speaker to amplify sound from the front seat to the back is too echoey to be pleasant to use. But I flipped through a few comfort settings and turned on a seat massage, then worked to connect my phone on Bluetooth. It passed the dummy test and connected almost instantly.
An Electric Workhorse
I wanted to use the EV9 as I would on a stereotypical LA day—drive to a meeting in Hollywood, have lunch in Los Feliz, visit the office in Century City, wind up the hills among the old Spanish houses of Whitley Heights. I also wanted to include highway driving in the Valley, where I could stop by a local plant nursery to put its 81.9 cubic feet of storage to the test.
When I got inside, the vehicle registered 266 miles, or almost 88% of its total range, if I drove in Eco mode the whole way. By the end of the day, after six hours of toggling through Sport, Normal and Eco modes, I still had more than 200 miles available and felt none of the range anxiety that plagues me in just about every other EV. (Mileage ratings shown on EV screens are mere suggestions rather than rules—they deplete faster than actual road miles, though they can also gain mileage back via regenerative braking.)
The 379-horsepower motor and 516 pound-feet of torque stayed smooth and strong at 80mph-plus cruising speeds and dusted off everyone at stoplights, like every EV worth its salt these days. It can go from 0 to 60mph in five seconds flat, more than a second faster than a Cadillac Escalade. Not bad.
As with any SUV that is almost 17 feet long and six feet tall, the EV9 is not a study in nimble maneuvers and delicate cornering. Its brakes and steering react to human input like an appliance rather than something with a life of its own.
It’s a nightmare to park, even with the excellent rearview cameras helping mitigate the disaster of constricted areas. After one 15-point U-turn up at the historic lookout tower in Whitley Heights, I simply quit entering parking lots during lunch, choosing instead to leave the car down the road on a stretch of curb. If your driveway and garage are anything but expansive, this is not the vehicle for you.
But thanks to its size, the EV9 can accomplish a lot. With a towing rating of 5,000 pounds, all-wheel drive and an onboard generator you can use as a power source in case of emergency, it felt like a vehicle I could count on. At that nursery in the Valley, I loaded 30 plants of not insubstantial size in the back, then drove to Home Depot and added more (plus three bags of soil, since it was on sale).
By the end of my test drive, I was dying to know how much the EV9 cost. No one would mistake it for a super high-end SUV, but it was good, really good. Surely it would be less than the $78,000 R1S.
Kia is staying mum on US MSRP for now, but in Korea, where the EV9 is already for sale, it’s 78.1 million won, or roughly $60,300. That means that while the EV9 will be the most expensive vehicle Kia makes—this is not your budget Kia anymore—it could still undercut the Rivian and presumably the upcoming Volvo EX90 and Cadillac Escalade EV seven-seaters, which are expected to run more than $80,000. (The Escalade will make its debut on Aug. 9, with deliveries starting next year; EX90 deliveries will begin in the second half of 2024, a Volvo spokesperson says.)
Which got me thinking: If you’re waiting for, say, the Volvo, Kia’s EV9 could be a stopgap until then. Who knows, once you’ve got it in your garage, it may never leave.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.