Kia EV3 Review 2024 – Top Gear

Kia’s newest electric crossover, and if you’re already familiar with the long-boi EV6, sharp-suited Niro EV and remember the kooky Soul EV… you might reasonably wonder where Kia has found space to cram another electro-not-quite-SUV into its line-up.

Well, it’s the smallest of the EV# family, priced from £33,000. Slap bang in the middle of VW Golf territory: the UK market yardstick for a normcore car. There will in time be EV4s and EV5s to plug the numerical gaps.

Back to the EV3 though, which smears a dash of the gargantuan EV9’s square-jawed moon buggy aesthetic onto a car about the same size as the Ford Explorer or Volvo EX30.

Thanks to some odd oblong-festooned alloy wheel choices and chunky wheelarches it manages to look distinctive and futuristic but doesn’t resort to fake grilles and gimmicks. You’ll probably still have to explain the weird ‘K backwards N’ logo to the neighbours though.

What’s the headline here? Range, tech, or price?

Actually it’s a bit of all three: Kia is coming in hot with the EV3, aiming not just to press home its advantage against the beleaguered mainstream European brands but also stay ahead of the incoming Chinese upstarts. That was Kia and Hyundai once. Aww, they grow up so fast.

So: long story short, you pay from £32,995 for the smaller battery single motor version; up to £43,895 for a range-topper. All EV3s are – for the time being – front-wheel drive only, with a single 201bhp motor providing the silent oomph.

Monthly payments for the entry-level ‘Air’ trim will scoot under the £400 a month barrier, while even a toppy model is unlikely to pass £500 a month according to Kia’s finance calculator, at the time of writing.

The standard range battery offers 58Wh of capacity and a 270-mile range. That jumps to a mighty 375 miles if you upgrade to the 81kWh long-range battery. It also increases the 0-62mph time, because it’s 85kg heavier, at 1,885kg. Just thought you should know – this isn’t one of those EV crossovers that hunts Civic Type Rs and Focus STs by night.

Thanks to Brits’ thirst for body kits and, well, kit, the GT-line and GT-line S trims will be most popular. Both get the bigger battery as standard, as well as 19-inch rather than 17-inch rims, faux leather seats, tinted glass and trick LED headlights. Head over the Buying tab for the full spec breakdown – there’s a lot thrown in.

Does it feel built down to a price inside?

Yes and no. Yes, in that there are some hard plastics and notable meanness like uncarpeted door bins. Your coffee flask is going to rattle.

But even an Air is festooned with screens, buttons and a solid sense of build quality. Kia’s proud of how much of the trim is sourced from recycled materials – like the larger EV9 – but it doesn’t feel repurposed. More ‘fit for purpose’.

Any spec pitfalls to note right away?

Indeed – if you buy an Air trim you appear to get the steering wheel from a 1980s Cadillac or Ford Crown Victoria. But we’ll come back to that when we climb inside proper…

Kia’s lost the element of surprise. We stopped being shocked when it made a good car a long while ago. When it comes to EVs, we expect them to be sniffing around the top of the class. But the EV3 drives the point home with a sledgehammer because it’s just so roundly, crushingly competent in the same way a Golf used to be.

Keenly priced and promising not to depreciate like a dropped ice lolly on a beach. Easy going and comfy to drive. Right-sized for families and not too bloated to park. It’s a roundly thought-out bit of kit as a ‘car’. And it doesn’t trip up when you factor in the ‘electric’ bit – adequate performance, strong range, and the ability to accept a speedy recharge. Not a given in an entry-level EV.

Our preference is the base-spec Air thanks to its slightly more pothole-friendly ride and its sense there’s everything you need and not much you don’t. The bings and bongs are tedious and need a recalibration so owners won’t automatically switch off the safety and assistance alerts, but that’s our chief bugbear.

Still, if the Chinese EV makers thought they’d sweep into Europe and gulp up the electric family crossover market overnight, their lives just got immeasurably harder.