Kia Picanto review

The first thing to check on the Picanto is how many seats you’re expecting – only the X-Line models come with five seats, the others are all four-seaters. Worth knowing if you’re expecting to give four friends a lift anywhere. Although, as with any city car, the three in the back might not remain on speaking terms if you keep them there for too long. 

The Picanto is good value, but that doesn’t mean that the interior feels cheap. Yes, there are ‘durable’ plastics inside, but you never feel that Kia’s skimped on the cabin. The higher up the spec sheet you go you’ll get interior colour accents, fancy fabrics and the like. From 3-spec upwards the Picanto comes with an eight-inch ‘floating’ central touchscreen that brings a bit of excitement to the dashboard.

In fact, the 1- and 2-grade models are probably best reserved for only the most dedicated of penny pinchers – those cars get two and four speakers respectively to go with the audio system (other models get six speakers) and have to make do with a miserly 3.8-inch monochrome display, which does at least have DAB radio installed. You’ll also miss out on a centre console with armrest and the 1-grade misses out on air conditioning. Yikes.

Not all of the touchscreen-equipped cars come with satnav, but they do all get Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which is an added convenience. 

Also useful are the plenty of little places for storage around the cabin, which makes it a more practical day-to-day proposition than you might imagine. The doors are extremely thin so the bins will take bottles, there’s space under the central armrest and a couple of shelves built into the centre stack of the dashboard too.

The button-to-dash ratio has been kept under control – in fact most of them seem to have wandered over to the multifunction steering wheel, which is familiar from other Kias and actually quite useful, ensuring that you don’t have to take your hands off the wheel too often.

Kia claims a ‘class best’ boot size for the Picanto – its 255 litres is certainly very impressive for a city car. It’ll swallow a weekly supermarket shop, but you won’t be volunteering to drive to the airport too often. That boxy shape means the boot extends to a very useful 1,010 litres with the seats down though – great news considering you won’t often have rear-seat passengers.