Kia K4 review

It’s a brand-new hatchback. In 2026! Kia has been on a roll over the last few years with a line-up of cars that look great, drive well, are tech savvy and competitively priced, and things are going so swimmingly the South Korean manufacturer has decided to keep the faith in a segment that has haemorrhaged interest lately.

The K4 is effectively its replacement for the Ceed, a car that will long have a place in the annals of Top Gear lore (even without the missing apostrophe) for having delivered countless celebrities around the TG test track in days gone by. No pressure.

And this is the first time Kia has brought a car to the UK that hasn’t been built either in Europe or in Korea. Nope, the K4 is assembled in Mexico, where production began in 2024 and hit North America first as a saloon. We won’t be getting that one, but the Sportswagon estate version is making its way here soon. Winning.

It’s a full 10mm bigger than the all-electric EV4 and – if you really must – the similarly sized XCeed crossover survives as an option. Kia has its fingers in many pies.

What’s under the bonnet?

You can either have a 1.0-litre mild hybrid with 113bhp or a 1.6-litre petrol churning out 147 or 177bhp. Both engines are four-pots and turbocharged. A ‘full hybrid’ (one that will do a small amount of electric-only driving) is coming at a later date.

A six-speed manual is an option, but only with the smallest engine, which also offers the seven-speed auto that can be twinned with the bigger 1.6. As you’d expect the 1.0 is the most economical at 49.6mpg but the slowest over 0-62mph, taking 12.2 seconds. Go for the most powerful K4 and that falls to a more respectable 8.4s.

More important though is the enormous boot, which dwarfs those of a VW Golf, Honda Civic, Peugeot 308, Mazda 3, and pretty much everything else except for a Skoda Octavia.

The interior is impressive, albeit riffing off every other car Kia makes, but such is the modern way. It’s clean and sophisticated inside and while it’s not without fault (make your way to the Interior section for those), the interface is a cut above those found in its mainstream rivals. Up front the K4 is spacious too, with lovely, enveloping seats.

In the metal we reckon it’s arresting to look at as well: confidently styled and estate-like in its profile. How does ‘a more strapping take on the long-bonneted Civic’ hit you as a strapline?

All sounds pretty good. So why are you so down on it?

Mainly the throttle response. It’s… terrible. There’s a yawning chasm the size of the Grand Canyon between input and output, both when you step off from a standstill and when you ask for a burst of acceleration. There are flappy paddles for a degree of manual control, but even these only give you a brief taste of freedom before the system wrestles back control. A modern auto really shouldn’t suffer this badly. It ruins the whole experience.

The car is also confusingly set up – the steering feels unnaturally weighted but the pedals are feather light – and isn’t rewarding to drive. The suspension is often fighting a losing battle with our gnarly roads. Sorry K4, but you’re a long way from California now.

Hmm. How does it sit in terms of cost?

The 1.0 manual opens the bidding at £26,045, with the auto adding another £1,500. Then it’s £31,345 to unlock the mid-spec, mid-power 1.6, and £36,245 for the most powerful engine, reserved for the highest trim level.

A Golf, Civic and 308, Toyota Corolla and Vauxhall Astra all cost more in entry spec, as do the Audi A3 Sportback and BMW 1 Series that the K4’s cabin could well pinch some custom from. Heck, it’s only really the Mazda 3 and Seat Leon that have it beat on sticker price.

That’s said, the entry K4 is painfully slow on paper and further up the tree its rivals are more evenly priced. So it depends: are you that sold on the interior and can you live with the stodgy drive?

Kia has tried to fill the Ceed-shaped gap in its line-up with a car whose first duty is to Americans, and while its refreshing cabin and dashing good looks translate on this side of the Atlantic, the way it behaves really doesn’t.

You could forgive it being a bit vanilla to drive, but the lack of cohesion emanating from the controls and the pronounced delay between instruction and action in the auto makes this a miss for us. The manual may be better, but on paper it looks short of power and torque for a car pushing a tonne and a half.

Still, if you can overlook those things this is a handsome machine with a broadly well-executed interior, excellent interface and a big boot. Can we call it the K-apostrophe-4, for old times’ sake?