- The Kia EV6 is a car that a lot of people
in our office like a lot, and I'm not among them. It's fantastic in many ways,
and just incredibly annoying, and a whole bunch of others
so I'm going to nitpick a whole bunch of things in this,
and if those all seem like stuff that you can live with there is a very good car underneath.
Seeing it in person, I am shocked by how much I like the looks of the EV6.
Just going off the photos, the IONIQ 5, I thought looked incredible,
and the EV6 was kind of, huh. But having seen both of them in person
the IONIQ 5 five looks kind of like a chunker and this thing, in my opinion at least, looks awesome,
and a whole bunch of people in the office agree. Kind of have this cool sporty sort of cat fishy front
that goes into this long sweeping thing that goes up into the, people say it's an Austin Martin
kind of taillight. I think it looks more like a Prius Prime, but whatever.
It's pretty sweet. (laughs) My favorite part though, is right under here.
There's this little light that during the nighttime lights up the haunch.
Kia calls it their silhouette lighting. It's pretty sweet, If I'm honest.
What surprised me the most about the looks though, is that despite this being one of the first in Canada,
no one cared, not a single second glance. You drive past a bunch of people and no one looks,
until I drove past a bunch of middle schoolers
on their little e-scooters. They were just like, "Ha, oh my God."
So that's who you impressed Kia, take from that what you wish.
Another surprise is just how damn big this thing is.
The wheel base on this is the same as a Kia Telluride,
it's longer than six feet. That's for sure. It kind of makes it a bit weird
when you're going around tight corners. I'm sorry, Kia but I nearly curved that tire a couple times.
Just you don't expect to be this long. Coming around to the tailgate, Kia does have a thing where
if you stand here for six seconds, it'll open up. I think it needs to be locked, but whatever.
You can just touch it right there.
One important note is that there is no sensor so if your garage is a little bit low, mine's here,
it actually goes up to there, you have to hold this button for three seconds
to set the height. Pretty simple, fairly standard.
I didn't know, 'cause I don't come from a power tailgate family. In here, there's a good amount of space
and you're able to put down the seats just like that.
Works awesome. It is kind of annoying that they give you this.
It's your charging cable if you want to just plug into a random house socket,
but I don't get why they couldn't have just packaged it in a way that goes underneath right here,
or maybe in the incredibly small front. It's just kind of awkward.
I would take out the cable and throw away this package. Overall though, the functionality here is pretty great.
Like this bit you can take out and stash underneath.
(car clanking) Oh.
Okay it's kind of difficult. (upbeat music)
(car clanking)
Just like that. One thing I was kind of shocked to learn is that
this one with the 14 speaker Meridian sound system
has a subwoofer. They really fooled me because somewhere around 80 Hertz
it just rolls off into nothing, there's no sub base whatsoever.
Let's have a look at it though. I'm guessing there's a little six inch sub in here
but it does not do a whole lot. The good news is though, that the other 13 speakers are quite good.
So if you are an audio file, you will likely be very happy
by just chucking this sub in the garbage and putting another little sub down here with an LCTY
and if you are not an audio file, you'll probably be happy
with the standard six speakers setup. Even though getting these seats down was super easy
in order to put them back up, you need to come around here and pull that.
It's pretty simple but not the most intuitive.
Getting in though. It's my first time in the backseats. This is quite a nice little area.
It's pretty borderline, my hair is hitting, but my head isn't.
I'm six feet tall by the way. These seats are comfy. You have heated seats.
I'm sure that's only a top trim option. We also even have little USB charging ports
on the sides of these seats.
I just moved the trunk, cover back one notch and now,
oh, I can recline, sweet. Oh, when you go back, you lose a lot of headroom.
That's too bad. (laughs) Oh, this thing goes up with it.
Moving up to the front though. The storage situation is a little bit weird.
So, LTT water bottle does not fit, unfortunately,
and this little spot here is not storage it's a fuse box.
(Andy and Alexander laughs) (car door bangs) Sitting in the driver's seat there's a whole lot of,
"Did you guys even test this?" Like this is a brand new electric vehicle
and there's not really a good spot to put your phone. Well, there is, it's right here, there's even a Qi charger,
but unfortunately that means that I can't use Android audio
because that's wired only, and in fairness you should use wired only
just because the audio is so much better, but like they very easily could have had a USB port here,
little cord that goes up to my phone. Would've been awesome, but they didn't.
So instead, the USB ports way up in here
and my phone I have to plug in and chuck down there.
Not a huge issue, that's not too bad, but it means that I can't put my water bottle down there
'cause it's gonna bash up my phone. I guess this means that I just have to Chuck my water bottle
into the backseat. It is nice that it'll remind me though to grab it.
Andy was getting in the backseat for a B-roll shot and now he's locked in.
- [Andy] Help me out. - We have no idea how to turn off the child locks in this,
it's actually a problem. - [Andy] I Wanna go.
- Now it's time to address the worst part of this car,
everything here, all of the stuff that you interact with.
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to help save time and work more efficiently. This stuff it's a mess honestly.
Porsche took at the Taycan and they were like, "Why do we make things that were easy,
way more difficult." And then VW came along and they were like,
"We can outdo you guys by a mile, make it just so much worse to use."
And then Kia came along. It was just like, "VW, hold my beer.
I'm gonna do this." So (laughs) here we have, what is quite an awesome
little spot, your volume, tune, seek, next track,
your media. All of this is great. Shut up.
It's not the most responsive either. Our problem is though, where are our climate controls?
You have to press that. Now we don't have volume. We do have temperature and our fan speeds right here,
but now I have no media controls. It's just, ugh.
Why, why did you have to do this Kia?
The absolute worst part about this, you might also accidentally hit one of these.
I cannot recall how many times I've been just driving down the road, I'm being like,
"Why is my hearse a hundred degrees?" It's because when I was hitting some of this,
I rest my hand here and accidentally press
any of these buttons. The passenger seat cooling is a pretty common one
that I hit as well. It's terrible. As for the actual touch screen that's here,
it works perfectly fine. My biggest complaint about it is that it's just
a little bit too far away. I kind of need to crouch forward every time that I use it
making it just not as nice to use. I'm sure with a week or two you'll have it down,
but there is a problem with though is the 12 inch screen
that's directly in front of me. It's a kind of a waste.
So we can look here. We have my speed on the left here
which is typically occluded by the steering wheel.
Fortunately, we do have a heads up display, that's the only thing that I've been using for speed
pretty much. We also have our charging over on the right. Same thing, can't see it because of the steering wheel,
but what sucks is that in the center I can't put anything that's useful there.
So, we have attention mode, my last break was 13 minutes ago apparently.
I could not care less about that. Go here, drive info.
It's all fine information that I want to have but a speedometer would be a lot more useful.
We have a compass, but no map. If it was a map I would be totally fine with it,
and information, this one's kind of cool.
If you look at it, then I don't know. It's fine. It's just, ugh.
Andy just asked if when you have nav on if it will show in here, as far as I can tell,
no, it only tells you like the next turn that you have to do.
So let's say I want to go over here.
Set his destination. Sure. It does tell you when your next turn is
but it's not giving you an actual map and it seems kind of like a waste.
Let's take it for a drive though, 'cause for the most part that is a good point in this.
Driving around, the first thing that you might notice is that that camera's pretty shaky.
This is a very smooth road. The ride is just a little bit on the harsh side.
It's well, it's pretty typical EV stuff really.
The Volvo had the same problem where it's just a little bit harsh
especially when it you're going a little bit slower, and then, as you get going faster
it sort of evens out a little bit. What I was hoping was
that this car has electronically adjustable dampers
so I can put it in sport mode here and the whole thing stiffens up.
It's pretty awesome actually, but when I put it in eco or normal
it doesn't get quite as comfortable as I would like.
There also is the added downside that there's no custom mode.
So I can't go in and play around with having like the dampers on their softest settings
and having the power train in its sporty setting, and I can just do eco mode with my right foot.
Speaking of my right foot though, there is a lot behind it.
This thing has 320 horsepower and 446 foot pound of torque.
Now, realistically you're probably not buying the one that's not powerful but if you do,
it has a zero to 60 and 4.6 seconds.
It is shockingly quick up until about a hundred kilometers per hour at which point it sort of
tapers off and isn't super fast, but how many people that buy this are going to care
if they can smoke like a Kova at 150.
I doubt it. One thing to note though, is that as the battery drops down past about 50%
you do lose that initial snap. And also you can turn off traction control
and it snaps even harder. (laughs) I love that you can turn off traction control on this.
It's just great. For the range, it's really quite good.
You can get about 350 kilometers real world
with climate control settings that are reasonable and a slightly heavy right foot pretty easily.
I think for most people that's gonna be more than enough. As for charging, it's your typical non Tesla EV,
just huge pain in the ass. Unless of course, you have a charger at your house,
in which case, you will charge it up there and probably never charge it up anywhere else
except on long road trips. One thing that's nice when you're driving around
is say you're changing a lane, when you turn on your signal
you get a little camera up here. It's pretty awesome actually
and also if there is someone in your blind spot, it will show up a little red thing
on the hood and around your car so you'd have have to try pretty hard
to lane change into someone. Overall this car is very good, but like everything else
it has a bunch of little annoyances that just add up to not really loving it.
So we have these floppy paddles here and they change the amount of regenerative braking
that you have. I personally like it the most
with the eye pedal on, that's your one pedal driving,
it'll completely stop you if you let off of it. The problem is though, is that I don't know why
but it'll just randomly leave this mode.
So you'll be in the not single pedal regenerative breaking
which is about the same until about 10 kilometers per hour.
At which point it starts moving forward on you so if you're expecting it to stop
it's kind of just a little bit scary. It's just strange.
The adaptive crews in the EV6 is quite good. It isn't exceptional like Audi system.
So if there's a car that's stopped in front of you, it will stop you,
but it's a bit back clunchy. If there's just someone driving in front of you though
or you're gonna stop and go traffic, it's pretty awesome.
Also, the lane keep assist is quite good.
It's a little ping pongy I found,
but I actually used it, which is more than I can say
about pretty much every other car that I've had. I think it's mostly down
to having the hard button here to enable and disable it
so when things get a little bit too complicated I can easily take over unlike in the Volvo
where just it's two menus deep, never used it.
One thing I love about this car though is the windshield wiper stock.
It is just hands down the best windshield wiper stock I have used in a car.
So you turn it and it just gives you a little readout
of what your front wipers are, how much your auto wiper setting is.
It's easy, and simple to use, and well thought through.
It's also a carryover from non EV Kias
so I guess that's why it's well thought through.
Oh, let's just pull over right here, I need to show the people our absolutely fantastic
parking camera. There we go.
Look at this. You have the 360 there and this one
that you can just turn around so you know exactly where you are.
It's by far the best 360 camera that I've ever seen in a car.
It is a little prone to dirt and water getting on it,
but it really isn't that bad. The only thing that does kind of suck is
that it shows up a white car here instead of a blue one.
Everyone should color match. Well, while we're pausing for one sec
just stay here, Andy, watch this.
Okay, maybe I have to get in the position. Come on.
Go. Yeah, huh, you're supposed to be able to hold these buttons
and it moves forward and backwards so you can get into small parking spots.
I can't get to work right now. Andy wants to do another launch.
That was good, that was a good one. (Andy and Alexander laugh) Ah.
- [Andy] My headphones are in the trunk now! Oh my God! - [Andy] For real. - So good.
- [Andy] I don't have my headphones now. (laughs) - Electric torque is so great.
What isn't great but's more just fine,
is the handle thing. It's reasonably sporty.
I'll put it in sport mode. Yeah, little bit sharper now.
There's quite a bit of body roll even though
all the weights nice and down low, it's skateboard platform.
And as you push on, it's all under steer a hundred percent.
I don't even think that changing the anti roll bars will be able to help you too much there.
That said, if you're coming from an SUV this will be fricking incredible, you'll love the handling.
If you come from, I don't know, a golf GTI like me, you won't be as happy.
Oh, I nearly forgot these seats they're pretty good. They're heated and cooled.
The cooling only comes and the top spec GT line but they're nice and comfy.
They hold me in reasonably well, I appreciate them.
The only thing that I don't like about the driving position is that the steering wheel has to be just a touch higher
than I want so that I can see my speed. Oh, can I hands free this corner?
- Nope, nope. - [Andy] No. - Can't that wasn't a good idea. (laughs)
Oh, I have a little twisty here though. Sport mode. (Alexander groans)
Yeah. You're not whipping it around corners,
it's certainly no Fiesta ST. Finally the price.
This one right here is in British Columbia, in Canadian dollars, $65,000
and for that I would buy a Tesla probably.
I'm not a huge Tesla fan but if those are my options, yeah.
That said, I would easily buy this over an RD4.
So the Kia EV6, it's quite a good car
with just so many tiny little screw up
that, I don't know, I don't like it in the end.
Like even just little things like we have these dedicated buttons here
that you can change to whatever you want except that it isn't really whatever I want.
Like we have a steering wheel button here for
I put it to quiet mode, which turns off the back speakers for your children
to sleep. That might be useful maybe.
(laughs) The other mode button here, they were so useless that I ended up just setting it
to sounds of nature. (bird chirping)
It was the one that I felt was the funniest so I just kind of threw it away on a gag.
Oh, and there also were fake engine sounds, I just turned those off. I was kind of driving around being like,
"Why is it so loud?" And it was just the speakers being like
(screaming) the whole time. (Andy laughs)
So, yeah, the Kia EV6 makes me want to
drive the IONIQ 5 really bad. Sorry, Kia.
Better luck next time. Okay, good note to end on. I liked it more than the Audi e-tron.
Mostly because it's way less expensive. Hit like, get subscribed, and just have a fantastic day.