Kia K4 review

Time for the K4 to claw back some credit. The interior is the best thing about this car: elegant, calm, fuss-free. Ahh. And built to last until the advent of the teleport a few centuries from now, as all Kias are these days. It’s very Volvo in GT-Line spec, with the cream highlights nudging the vibe away from ‘depressingly dark and deathly dull’.

Even the plastic on the centre console gets an attractive, flat finish that won’t serve as a forever home for fingerprints. Premium plastic, is that a thing? It is now.

Special mention also has to go to the front seats – if they were any more cossetting you’d be wearing them, not sitting in them. They’re generously padded with a deep amount of squidge (that’s the technical term, ahem), and how nice it is too to sit low down rather than at altitude as you would in an SUV?

Take me through the tech.

Good bits first. The huge screen is actually a row of three, with a 12.4in instrument cluster and 12.3in touchscreen bookending a 5.3in climate display. The graphics are razor sharp, the screen responds quickly and you’ll have worked out where everything is within an hour of getting in.

The native sat nav is perfectly serviceable, but Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are both available if you prefer. When we connected our phone via Bluetooth, it took mere seconds and worked first time. That’s so often not the case, even in this day and age.

Kia hasn’t overdone it though. There’s a row of buttons for the major screen menus, a scroller for volume and rocker switches for the temperature and fan speed. Not to mention all the functionality on the steering wheel.

I sense a but coming…

But… there are issues. That climate screen, for example, is obscured by the steering wheel so you can’t use it on the move without craning your neck. The touchscreen is so wide that anything on the far left is a real stretch to reach, and one that takes too much attention away from the road.

And then there’s the ADAS. Far too many taps and scrolls to turn off any annoying alarms, which you’ll need to do for every journey (because they default to on by law). The lane keep system has a mind of its own, though this is almost universally true and not unique to Kia.

This tickled us: there’s a warning to check you haven’t left anyone in the back seats when you get out of the car. Switch that off, and it’s replaced with… a message reminding you you’ve turned the alert off. Spiffing.

The cupholders in the centre console are generous, and can be spun away when you don’t need them. The central storage box is fine but not massive; the door bins are a bit skimpy. Rear visibility is okay – the side cameras help but they’re more for checking for cyclists in town than traffic approaching from behind.

Will my kids like it back there?

There’s a couple of USB ports back there so they’ll be fine. Taller folk might notice a shortage of toe room, and because the floor’s quite high your knees come up at an angle. The middle seat is only really for kids, and any child small enough will probably still be in a car seat anyway. Odd.

Headroom will be fine for six-footers. The door bins back here are tiny, but you can hang a coat over the hump in the front seat.

The boot looks pretty big.

It is! Bigger than virtually anything else in this segment at 438 litres with the seats up (1,217 with ‘em folded down), and that’s despite the wheelarch liner not sitting flush to the metalwork. There’s also a huge polystyrene unit under the floor that only houses a tyre inflation kit – Kia could’ve packaged that better and made more use of the space, frankly.

Regardless, that’s plenty more room than you’ll get in the back of a Golf, 308, Civic and A3 Sportback, even if the K4 is still humbled by the hatchback version of the Skoda Octavia. No one out-boots a Skoda Octavia.

The K4 has one trick up its sleeve though… a ski hatch! You’ll probably only poke one set of skis though there, but we appreciate the thought. Onwards to Chamonix!