Kia e-Niro. Is it still worth considering?

Hello, two hours north of this remote place is the city of Greenwich, the birthplace of James Watt, the man who invented many wonderful things but who also gives his name to the unit of energy with which we measure the capacity of electric car batteries by eight miles. That way you will find the city of Dumfries the birthplace of Ian Callum the designer of the Jaguar Eye Pace one of my favorite electric vehicles and what I consider the most attractive Jagger since the e-type in the same city Alan Mcnish three time winner lemon and current formula e The Audi boss was born and raised and a few miles north of there is the town of Twinum, where former F1 driver and current Extreme E team boss David Coulthard was born and raised and approximately A mile in that direction, in the town of Vlogman, is where The UK's leading EV journalist was born and raised.

That's me, by the way, so it's fair to say that this part of Scotland has a small but tangible link to the electric car, so what better place to bring one for this week's electric car road test. so welcome to Scotland, welcome to the ke nero and welcome to otv now before we move on to this week's road test review of the kia e nero of course it's that moment when I ask you yes that's right , people like the video, subscribe to the channel press the little bell button down there so you don't miss notifications when the next video is uploaded and if you do I will be very grateful given the Scottish theme this week i'll bring you all the haggis and the iron beer bottle back okay, back to the car the kia

niro

isn't a new car by any means, in fact in terms of electric cars it's probably getting a little better now because it has been out for three years, but although we have hosted it for the magazine, we never featured it on the channel and this sort of mid-term when my daughter was on vacation and the fact that the seizures in the Kingdom were blocked a little bit Kingdom gave me ample opportunity to bring one into a family. vacation because that's really the ultimate test for one of these family crossovers, but is it any good?

Has it been good enough for my family to come on what will be an almost 700 mile trip? Let's find out the style for 2021, not much. They actually changed, moved the rings a little bit within the range, added a lower capacity battery which is also available, as is its cousin the dog icon, but style wise it pretty much stays the same as you have it. Kia's familiar tiger nose at the front here, which is complete on the electric version, doesn't have the grille found on the petrol or hybrid models and of course you get the kind of blue flashes, blue electric flashes and a lot of Scottish style. mosquitoes attached to the front not sure they are standard I think I probably added them myself there are three trim levels with the January there is confusingly the two three and the four plus the four plus is only identified because it gets full LED headlights as standard users, this one, which is the three, the mid-range three only gets this type of zenon projector lamps, which is fine, other than that there really isn't much to determine between the levels of equipment in terms of style, it's a little safe and a little bland and forgettable in some ways, but maybe that's not a big criticism because remember that we also do to the soul that kind of funky crossover style that uses the same mechanics and battery that the arrows ian if you want something that's a little bit more prominent and look at me, then you have that option if you want to be a little more, I don't know, withdrawn and not at all prominent, then it's perfect, yeah, and on the sides, well, nothing has really changed, you get a good alloy. wheels, you get the kind of satin finish, the roof rails, if you need to carry loads of extra capacity, you get the privacy glass on the three and four plus um yeah, pretty much like white, yeah, and in the back it's okay , it's more or less the same actually.

Again, you get the nice LED headlights, a good coat of scotch dust and that's an optional extra roof spoiler with blue parts, yeah, not that interesting is it? But I'm not afraid because that's where the bad news ends. because this is a great family cardio of course it's the mini suv crossover style type and it's a really practical car as we've discovered now the boot space is 451 liters now what we wanted to mention with this um in this. vacation three folding camping chairs a doll with large holes a medium holder for my camera bag bits of my daughters my daughter a small dog and all the paraphernalia that comes with them and it all fits very, very well because the boot is very usable Sized and with good usable space, you also get a 60 40 split rear seat which would increase the capacity to over 1400 liters and you also have underfloor storage for your cables, so it's practical enough for this type of trip.

It's great too, I have bags of neerum back here. There is good footroom under the seat. I can put my feet under here and the headroom is fine for someone my size. Obviously, there are two isofix points as you would expect, one on this side and one on that side. It's spacious enough in the backyard, my daughter and small dog will testify to the only black mark: the lack of USB charging here for the obligatory iPad and the door bins, well, they'll take a bottle of water, but nothing more to say yes. I have a folding armrest with a couple of cup holders, but yeah, the lack of USB charging back here, I'd say that's the only black mark I can find right now.

The front environment, the driver and front passenger environment is excellent, I have to say. I prefer this integrated style screen that Kia makes to the ones that are stuck on the ones that sister company Hyundai makes, but I say it's not that I don't know, it's not as elegant and perhaps as cutting edge as other cars on the market. on the market, but it's nice that the fact that you have physical buttons for things like heating and ventilation makes the cars very well equipped as standard, so these are the three mid-range ones that I have here, so they have heated leather seats. on the heated front steering wheel, all cars have Apple Carplay and Android Auto, the lowest spec m2 has an eight inch touchscreen, up here the three and four plus have this 10 and a quarter inch touchscreen and again, revised slightly for this. model year it doesn't have it it can't be seen at all it's a little bit stuck it's a little bit more integrated into the dash and I see that it's really nice you have a nice clear digital instrument panel display in front of us that you can also modify Depending on whatever you want to see, you can have the navigation up there, you can have your car settings or the fuel consumption settings up there, as well as get a nice leather steering wheel that heats up in the three and the four plus if you go up to the four plus.

The trim level increases, you get ventilated front seats, heated seats in both the rear and front, you also get the excellent JBL audio system and a couple of extra items on the safety equipment side so you get a rear cross-traffic alert and a blind spot monitoring, as well as the lane keep assist and radar-guided cruise control and autonomous braking that you get in the other two trim levels, but getting back to the actual cabin, it's all there. in a really nice location, it's a wonderfully comfortable cabin. To go on a long trip where it differs from gasoline and hybrid cars, you have this different front console here, so you have a lot of storage space.

I mean, I have two big cup holders here. I have a large center armrest with cargo in there. I have this huge big container, uh, sorry, tray in front of you. You know, there's a little console here. I have wireless charging that is activated for my cell phone, which is on the three and the. four more, but not in the two, the transmission is controlled by this rotary dial. Here we have neutral in reverse and driver's p for park, so everything is nice and easy to reach. It's a really nice cabin, like I say, to be here.

For the long trip we have made, I can't think of anything better to say because all the information you will need regarding your consumption has been excellent, the autonomy you have left and everything is easy to read, it is easy to see and, as I say , everything feels very good. Putting the plastics together, you know, you get soft touch rubbers up here on the dash, everything feels really solid and well bolted together, um, yeah. I'd say there's probably Volkswagen levels of build quality here, if not a little better, some of the plastics, you know, okay, they might be a little more scratchy, but like I say, they're well screwed together and well put together, you've got this piano. black with a glossy finish here and on the doors and there it gets a little dusty and leaves a little fingerprints but other than that nothing to complain about here now as I said before the ke nero has changed slightly so I have the option of a 39 kilowatt hour battery but that's only available on the level two car which should give an expected range or to go to WLTP figures of 118 miles on models three and four plus, It's a 64 kilowatt hour battery and that's mated to a 201 brake horsepower motor on the bottom battery, it's got 134 brake horsepower, so the performance is slightly different as well.

It's a tier three car I have with me today so it's the 64 kilowatt hour battery which Kia says should give up to around 280 miles on a charge, I've come up with wltt figures now when I got out of my home in surrey the other day on a full charge it was seeing 255 miles and the only thing i will say about kia and hyundai is that they don't. I don't think anyone can match them for efficiency and expected range because that's pretty much what I can see with a full charge now, if you're going to charge the car on the road like I had to, it'll take until you can go. up to speeds of 100 kilowatts and if you can find a 100 kilowatt charger to go from eight to eighty percent charging on a hundred kilowatt charger, that's 50 minutes in a more likely scenario where you reach a 50 kilowatt charger m, So it will be around 75 minutes, so it takes a little longer to charge the car than, say, a Volkswagen ID4 with its 77 kilowatt hour battery on level 4 plus.

You also get a three phase on board charger but that's not available on the Other two now I have to give a big shout out here to Knutsford arms and where we stopped on the way to charge the other day with their Osprey charger great service food Reasonably good and they saved our table for over two hours after our reservation time because we got stuck in traffic, so thank you very much, but that brings me to a really valid point. One of the main reasons I brought the kia here is because kia is now doing something called kia charge, which comes with this little RFID card and that gives me access to something in the region of about 14,000 charges, so I don't do them.

I need, I don't need to download a lot of different apps and have a lot of different things on my phone, I just stopped putting the card against the machine and charged the car really, very simple, that's my point about electric car destination charges, I think which is where it is, you don't want to stop at a service station and have to sit for an hour charging your car, but going somewhere like a pub where we could sit and eat with my daughter and my dog, that makes a lot more sense now which I mentioned that there are two power variants available on the enaro, there is the lower brake 134 horsepower motor available, but that is only tied to the 39 kilowatt hour battery, so if it is a 64 kilowatt hour battery , so you've got 201 brake horsepower, that's enough to send 60 from rest in 7.5 seconds, so it's pretty quick, uh, for a It's something like this size of family crossover and it feels pretty peppy. .

You have the different driving modes that we are used to seeing in all these cars and there is eco, eco plus normal and sport, even in the eco mode, which I must admit I have used, I actually didn't even know about it, I thought it was the In normal mode, the car has a reasonable level of response from its throttle, so when you go into normal mode and then into sport mode, actually when you put your foot on the accelerator it is enough to give a little cooling to the little front, a the front tires when you come out of a junction or something, but I think it's something different where the Nero really wins over the competition and that's in its refinement that I've done.

Some pretty long trips at Nero's over the years, I did one to Cornwall a couple of years ago for the magazine and as I say we came to Scotland and such and the way it copes with hard surfaces I think is commendable , it feels. There's a little bit of biblical silence here sometimes, you know, there's a little bit that we always say,Obviously you get more ambient noise from other areas because you don't have to deal with engine noise, but a little bit of wind rustling around the rearview mirror is probably as much as you've had to deal with road noise, it's fine. suppressed and it beats its sister company Hyundai for that because I think the corner is really bad because of the road noise, the Nero, not at all, it's really very quiet. car it's a really smooth car to drive on a long trip the steering feel is good too I mean okay yeah we've always said these aren't the kind of cars where you're going to take some corners but He is quite communicative.

It's okay, you know, you know where the wheels are pointing, it doesn't feel too light, it has a good weight for the spine. I have a very good driving position. The breaks. Well, you have good brakes as standard. There is a good feel in the pedal, but the regeneration can be passed through three other levels and that is done through these two paddles. behind the wheel, so you're on a highway, an open road that you want to go on, you can turn it to the right or if you're in the city, you can dial it up so it's almost a drive pedal when it's at the level three and it has a really nice retardation so as soon as you take off you feel like the car stops, that's great, the ride comfort is also great, it also has a longer wheelbase in the corners so it doesn't It feels so bouncy. um like its little brother car and it's probably a little bit better than it looked than what a counterpart sold also within the Kia zone range so I have to say this is a really very nice car to drive and I think it's hard find faults. that really I mean it's comfortable to drive it's fast it's smooth it's refined I mean now we're on a really smooth part of the road like a pool table and the lightest thing I can hear is myself breathing and that's pretty good Unless I'm having a heart attack of course, and I don't realize, I don't think I am, it's too quiet here to have a heart attack, it's too pretty and look at the weather in Scotland, who knew now that Kate has moved with the strait. range due to the UK government's change to the plug-in car grant which reduces it to the maximum limit of £35,000, so you can buy a grade two car with the 39 kilowatt battery or the 64 kilowatt hour battery per below that level, meaning the range increases is just above the £30,000 mark, which is very good value for money, this Tier 3 car, however, is above that roof, weighs a little over 37,000 pounds as tested and the four plus that comes in at just a little under forty thousand pounds, so there's a pretty big difference between the bottom level, level two, all the way up to the four plus model. , but at least you have that option now, the competition for the Kia is huge, as we've always said, this 30-40,000 pound group with family crossovers is literally bursting at the seams, you have slightly smaller cars available, like the um ds3 crossback e tanks, the vauxhall mock up that we featured the other week and of course hyundai and key assistant company have the kona electric, but you have also got cars like the volkswagen id4 that weigh between 30 and 40 thousand pounds, rated like anyak, its version of the meb platform that will come in 2k, its own soul, which could also be seen as competition for this e2008 persian car and of course.

At £25,000 the mg zs ev evergreen though has a much lower range so here's what we like and don't like about the kia e needle. We like its range in tuning performance of 64 kilowatt hours, its refinement and its practicality. I don't like its slightly anonymous styling, the higher-spec trim levels are starting to look expensive compared to newer competition and the interior isn't as stylish and modern compared to some of its newer rivals. I've always quite liked the Nero, in fact, my brother. my father in law used to have a hybrid that he had for three years and he just traded it in for another care.

The reason I brought this car into this family is horrible because I wanted to see that against the New York competition, whether it was me or not. it

still

had what it took to be a top contender whether or not we could recommend it as

worth

your money if you're looking to spend £35,000 on an electric family car and I think the answer is a resounding yes, it's tough . To find fault with the car, okay, the styles may be a little anonymous and the newcomers inside maybe give you a little more space and maybe a little more elegant design inside, but if that doesn't cares, then organizing that it will do it with the efficiency with which it does it and the refinement and the quietness with which it will do it and just makes it such a sensible choice as a family car.

Are you

still

a competitor? Yes, this bodes well for Kia in the future. because of course this year we will see the launch of the new ev6 and if it is half as good as this one then I will be absolutely delighted with it, not only is it

worth

y of consideration but it is still pretty close to the top. place when it comes to electric family crossover cars, oh and if you're wondering what's behind me, by the way, this is lochmaben castle, home of robert, king bruce of scotland at one point, so there you have a electric car review and a story. lesson you don't understand on other channels, thanks for watching auto ev as always, remember to like and subscribe to the channel, send us some comments below and if you haven't been there, head over to auto uev dot. co dot uk where our library of practical test reviews is waiting for you thanks again see you soon so you've watched our video now it's my job to tell you to like and subscribe and hit the little bell button to get a notification when our next video is uploaded