Kia EV3 Review: Price, Specs, Availability

The EV3 is Kia’s archetypal compact EV, a car that has excited observers successful the plan satellite for transferring the XXL EV9’s maximal Minecraft aesthetic onto a smaller platform. Its wheelarches are blocky, its sills fashionably pinched, and adjacent the wheels themselves person a quadrate motif.

It looks similar the household transport the aboriginal promised us, and from wherever I’m presently sitting—the backmost spot connected a four-up tally to the airport—it feels big-car comfortable. Kia has worked hard to trim the triple bugbears of noise, vibration and harshness, and their lack is palpable.

Concept-car-made-real plan isn’t the lone happening that’s generating large buzz. The EV3 claims the astir important scope of a small-ish electrical car, an awesome 375 miles (WLTP). It’s besides packed with tech usually reserved for precocious conception cars. And contempt its comparatively compact size (4.3m long, 1.85m wide), it’s roomy capable wrong to enactment Kia’s assertion that this could beryllium the household’s main car.

There’s a 25-liter frunk, and up to 1,250 liters of luggage abstraction astatine the back. All told, a tipping constituent has been reached successful the accelerated moving EV landscape. Did we notation that prices commencement from £32,995? US fans volition person to wait, however, arsenic it's expected to onshore stateside successful 2026 for astir $35,000.

That’s for the entry-level Air exemplary fitted with a 58.3kWh battery, though you’ll request £10k connected apical of that for the Long Range GT-Line S mentation with the 81.4 kWh artillery which delivers that eye-catching 375 mile figure. It arrives into a engaged sector, the EV3 lining up alongside the likes of the Volkswagen I.D3 and Volvo EX30, though it’s a amended equipped, much value-for-money proposition than those premium rivals. Old habits dice hard.

Space-Age Vibes

Perhaps they should, due to the fact that the EV3 confirms that some tech and plan enactment present reside successful South Korea. That blocky signifier is really impressively aerodynamic: The EV3 has a resistance co-efficient of 0.26, the worldly of sci-fi not truthful agelong ago. That, of course, is bully for scope and efficiency.

It sits connected the group’s E-GMP (electric planetary modular platform), a scaleable architecture that underpins cars specified arsenic the awesome Hyundai Ioniq 5. Although it’s smaller than that car, it has a akin airiness to its interior, Kia pushing the lounge vibe beauteous hard. There’s a sliding tray halfway console large capable to remainder a laptop on, should you person the impulse to crook your car into an office. The seats look and consciousness good, and tin beryllium tilted mode back. More relaxing space-age loungey vibes… get Juan García Esquivel onto the (Harman/Kardon) dependable strategy now.