Kia Sportage

The new Sportage impresses with its good looks, excellent build quality and the long equipment list on the early models. Shame then, that on the road it isn't as good as Kia thinks it is.

• Comfort

  The ride's pretty good but as usual there's a pay-off in excessive bodyroll and steering so utterly vague it might as well be a government spokesman.

  

• Performance

  For the moment, you can have the Sportage with a two-litre diesel auto and four-wheel drive, a 2.0-litre petrol with 2WD, or a 2.4-litre petrol with either two- or four-wheel drive. With 135kW the diesel goes well, despite what the official 0-100km/h time of 10.2 seconds tells you. The wide spread of torque is well line-managed by the six-speed gearbox. It's also nicely refined with little intrusive noise. The petrols aren't as impressive but still do the job.

  

• Cool

  You won't want to hurl when looking at this one. Better than before.

  

• Quality

  Inside, the Sportage's design avoids the usual soft-roader cliches and uses the sort of good quality materials that Kia can do well (although didn't with the Sorento). There have been no corners cut with this car.

  

• Handling

  The new Sportage feels big and cumbersome on the road. The ride's comparatively soft, which is no bad thing in itself, but it's combined with a strange corkscrew motion over bumps that gets a lot worse if you put in any sort of sudden steering movement. Which you probably wouldn't do anyway to avoid overworking the spongy steering. It's fine at low speeds but over 80km/h it feels like it's riding on chunky off-road tyres when it isn't. We're not talking about putting an off-roader through GTI-like extreme cornering by the way. These are things that manifest themselves at gentle speeds where any of the Sportage's rivals would be perfectly untroubled.

  

• Practicality

  Inside it's very roomy, which is what's going to sell it to families. Admittedly the boot's shallow (that's only because Kia is kind enough to throw in a full-size spare alloy) but it's still 564 litres.

  

• Running costs

  The 2.0 diesel offers excellent running costs for its class. It returns 7.5L/100km which isn't great for a small diesel SUV, but residuals should be much better than for the unloved old car, and it has a five-year warranty.