Main Kia Sportage review here:
So i’m stood in front of a new kia sportage even though i just reviewed one a couple of weeks ago so why thanks for asking it’s because this is the plug-in hybrid electric version the fev it’s the most powerful it’s the quickest and yet it’s the most efficient version of the car so big question is is it any good is it the best one it should be let’s find out all
Right so let’s just give you a little bit more detail about the drivetrain of this thing what you’re looking at here is a 178 horsepower 1.6 liter petrol engine linked to a 90 horsepower electric motor and powered by a 13.8 kilowatt battery pack that’s good for a claimed 43 mile electric only range this is the first time that the sportage has been available with
A plug-in hybrid which means it’s by some distance the most economical sportage ever on paper anyways okay so that’s the drivetrain what are the actual pros and cons of this thing because it is more expensive but that’s pretty much the only con because the pros are the fact that it is the quickest one on paper it’s very quick at least it is very very efficient
Especially if you use it the right way if you keep your battery topped up maybe using it over short distances and also the tax benefits if you’re like a company car driver or fleet user or whatever are absolutely immense ikea says that because of the way they’ve set this up because of how efficient it is it is one of the most tax effective plug-in hybrid electric
Family crossovers on the market just eight percent bik and there’s a couple of advantages that it has that make it that way the first advantage is that it charges quickly well relatively quickly as compared to most plug-in hybrids so as standard it comes with seven kilowatt charging speed capability whereas usually you get half that speed and that means because
The battery is pretty small it gets charged really quickly convenient so the battery according to kia will get you over 40 miles of electric only ridge now obviously we know with these things that that is never the case but that sort of number suggests that what you will actually get is 25 to 30 which is still going to be more than enough for most people who are
Using this as a commuter car short distances to work and back now obviously this is a launch event the battery is full but what i’ve noticed is that it is actually pretty keen to stay on battery power alone next thing we’re going to do obviously is test what the transition is like between electric and petrol power let’s do that foot down okay so it’s quiet and it’s
Relatively smooth but also it’s pretty big gap there nokia has developed the six-speed automatic gearbox specifically for this application now the good thing about that is doesn’t matter that it might be a little bit sluggy i haven’t really found out yet but even if it is it is going to be better than the cvt type setup that you quite often get in plug-in hybrids
They’re just awful all that rubber banding that sense that you have to wait to get into the power band the noise horrible this already when he driven it for half a mile feels like a far far more conventional setup and it does feel really really refined that was something that was very apparent in a standard sportage if you like one with just a petrol engine i’m
Driving the diesel yet but what this does is because it’s in electric power quite a lot of the time it’s trying to stay there it gives you even more refinement because you’re not having to deal with the internal combustion sound as much as you would in a car whose power only comes from internal combustion obviously so i can already tell you that this is the most
Refined version of a car that is brilliant at that anyway now i have already done a video on this so you should watch that if you want a more comprehensive overview of what this car’s like in general but what i basically said there is that this is the best mid-level family crossover on the market now now the only problem i heard with the standard sportage is that
The engine is a bit gruff right and this setup is a 1.6 petrol engine but it’s attached to an electric motor and a battery setup what you’ll find is that you will still get that little bit of roughness if you accelerate hard it’s just the nature of the beast it’s definitely the wrong word the nature of the thing so i’m actually going from a 30 to a 60 here so
I’ll show you right listen see so it’s not gruff as such it’s just a bit characterless it’s actually very well muted and you do get that natural sense of gears changing when you’re using all the power because of the way they set the gearbox up because it’s got like a more traditional automatic gearbox attached to the setup but the good thing is that by default
This becomes the most refined version because it’s either running again on pure electric power or the engine’s not being worked as hard because the two things are working together now the ride quality does seem degraded ever so slightly which is an obvious thing really because actually the way to package this car is by placing the battery under the chassis so if
You look under the car you can see it’s covered obviously it’s protected but the battery is just strapped to the bottom of the thing so what you’ve got is more weight pressing down they’ve had to adjust the suspension slightly to cope with that but it always means that you get that little bit extra fidgetiness and the right quality that the other versions just don’t
Have so it doesn’t feel quite as outright luxurious one of the most amazing things that i thought about this car when i first drove it is it does in some ways feel like a luxury car it feels much better than you would expect a mid-level family crossover to be and this obviously feels the same but you just have to pay a little price in terms of the outright comfort
For the battery setup and the weight that you get the extra weight good low end throttle response assuming that you’re not pushing things too hard if you just want to get by quite gently it does pick up fairly quickly really light steering’s quite sharp the body control is really good both in terms of the cornering of it and in general the lateral body movement
Is actually quite well controlled it almost just has a feel of a car that’s on big wheels that’s kind of what the main ride quality is like now from a packaging perspective the cabin itself because of where they’ve put the battery doesn’t lose any space so it’s exactly the way that another sport touch would be sometimes they have to put the battery under the rear
Seats and they get lifted up and then you lose head room in the back that’s not the case here you do lose boot space though so let’s jump out of the car and look at the boot now let’s check out that hole do you know what toby the cameraman said about this boot he went it’s definitely much smaller you didn’t see it in jordy because he’s not jordy’s from london or
Somewhere but i’ve left this stuff in here so that you can see how much you can get into this boot even though it is smaller i’ll show you it empty though now now the reason that this hole is exactly 51 liters smaller than the hole in the standard sportage is very simple it’s because there’s stuff underneath the floor linked to the plug-in hybrid system you’ve got
The charging system and the 12-volt battery under here what you’re left with is a tiny little polystyrene tray where you can stick your cable and a little bag not much else so going back to what i said at the start about reasons why this is more efficient or slightly better than other equivalent plug-in hybrids it’s actually because not only have they developed
The gearbox specifically for efficiency it’s got a small capacity engine so for example if you look at the ford cougar plug-in that’s got a 2.5 what they’ve done here is giving it a 1.6 but a slightly more powerful electric motor so you get a 90 horsepower motor total capacity is horsepower again doesn’t feel that powerful doesn’t feel that quick but what that
Gives you is this sort of sense of effortlessness you don’t really have to work this hard to get it moving along nicely and therefore you should see some fuel advantages for that reason now weirdly upper levels of this car not only get extra four-wheel drive terrain type settings they all get four-wheel drive as standard but if you get one of the up by two trims
You get terrain mode so you can have extra traction in snow and mud and stuff like that which is kind of useful but you can also get something called e-handling right yep they’ve given this a handling benefit with the hybrid so what it does the electric motor itself is actually attached to the transmission yeah so it’s not out at the back on the back axle what i
Can do is if you’re powering into a corner the electric motor acts as like a torque vectoring thing on the rear axle so it kind of breaks the wheels a little bit to transfer the way to the front so you get more front end grip and then better turn in and then once you’ve turned out of the corner once you’ve gone back into the street it then gives you more power at
The rear so you can power out of it a bit now kier says it’s subtle so i’m guessing it’s not the sort of thing that we can actually demonstrate by barreling into a corner and going oh this handle’s nice for a big fella i think it’ll just make it feel that little bit tighter around the corner when i get to one i’ll tell you my aim is to try and make toby feel sick
All right so i’ve come to a corner let’s see how a handling works put down into it just felt like a big bloody crossover but quite a nice one steering’s really good in this thing you know it’s quite a lot of body movement i don’t think e handling is going to be a selling point for anybody here to be honest with you but i’m just glad that they did it as with most
Of these things it’s got driving mode so you can select whether you want it in hybrid mode or electric only mode or like power save mode i always find these things a little bit pointless though because you’ll put it into electric mode and then if you put your foot down too hard or the battery runs out obviously or whatever then it just decided you can’t be in that
Mode anyway and yet in hybrid mode it will always want to be in electric mode so i think it’s just about making you feel like you’ve got control over so much anyway i’ve put it into electric mode and let’s see how far we can get before the engine kicks in feathering the throttle here it’s really not that happy to accelerate because obviously we’ve only got 90
Horsepower dragging along a car this heavy i’m doing 35 now into a 60 and there’s the mortar in fairness the transition of the mortar is really good but once it hit 40 there it just didn’t want to know anymore with the battery i was like yeah i need petrol just by the chassis a little bit so it does have independent suspension all the way around and it has fixed
Damper settings you can’t get adjustable damping in this car and actually i didn’t think i’d say this ever because usually adaptive damping setups just really don’t make that much difference because you’re constantly just trying to figure out whether it really is a bit softer or it really has got a bit harder i probably could have put that better i couldn’t but i
Do wonder whether in this car would make a bit of a difference because it does feel a little bit like this car would benefit in certain situations from softening the damping up very slightly but it does actually feel a bit heavy it does feel a bit like it’s slamming down when the tires hit something that is a bit less than smooth i guess what the hybrid here does
Though in a fundamental sense it feels very normal in a good way it’s very efficient you know it really is a sort of plug-in and play type experience you don’t have to mess around with driving modes you don’t have a horrible cbt gearbox to deal with why i think it feels very conventional very quiet comfortable almost luxurious in the same way that the standard
Or that s standard sportage is what having the hybrid drivetrain is done though aside from just making it much more tax efficient and hopefully more economical for you they just make it feel even more techy even more high-end because the car basically feels like that anyway it’s got this amazing cabin i love these haptic buttons that control the aircon and the
Infotainment and it just feels like the sort of car that has melded loads of technology together but into a package that just feels like really well sorted out really coherent it’s actually really lovely to drive there’s no hint that there’s too much going on here even though there really is some of the stuff this car has got especially the top man is amazing for
Example it has a cruise control system that’s not only adaptive in the sense that it will accelerate and break and stuff like that but it also hooks up to the sat nav and then if the car knows that there’s a corner coming up even on a motorway there’s a slight bend it will adjust your speed accordingly so that you don’t go around that corner too fast it’s dead
Good it’s got some amazing tech in this i honestly think that particularly with this car kia has left above everything that volkswagen and most of the other mainstream manufacturers are doing at this price in fact probably all of them it’s that good for me there are only really two things that you want to be thinking about alongside this for slightly different
Reasons so you’ve got the hyundai tucson plug-in hybrid which is a very similar experience to this for obvious reasons but mainly the peugeot 3008 plug-in hybrid now as an overall package it’s not as refined as this thing is not quite as comfortable not quite as spacious or just easy to live with but it is more interesting both aesthetically and dynamically so i
Think that is something that if you want a bit of a driving experience with your tax efficient family wagon then the peugeot was definitely something to think about but i reckon still this is the best one well done kia and we’ll end it there thank you for watching bit different to our normal stuff that but if you liked it please check out our other reviews leave
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Transcribed from video
2022 Kia Sportage PHEV First Drive | Is Kia's 256mpg Plug-In Hybrid The Ultimate Family Car? By Vanarama
