Kia EV3 Review

If you haven’t bought an electric car yet, the Kia EV3 could be the one to convince you to make the switch. You might hesitate to buy an EV for various reasons – maybe cost, range, value for money or sustainability – but the EV3 has the answer to all these concerns.

Entry-level EV3s start from £33,000, which is the sort of money you’d need for a well-specced Ford Focus. This’ll do 270 miles on a charge in ideal conditions or, for £3,000 more, you can have 375 miles of range. And the EV3 not only features plenty of standard equipment, but a lot of recycled materials too. Not to mention a seven-year warranty (the battery’s covered for eight years). So far, so good.

Better news is that the EV3 is an absolutely brilliant family car to use as your daily driver. It has a smartly thought-out interior with acres of space up front, more storage areas than a mortuary and all the tech you could reasonably ask for. The back seats are even roomy enough for tall adults, and the 460-litre boot is about as big as you'd ever need outside of extended holidays.

So it's an electric SUV? That means it's so heavy and firmly sprung it'll grind your vertebrae to dust as soon as you hit a pothole then… right? Wrong. Kia's spent time developing the EV3 in Europe to ensure it doesn't rattle over bumps. A simple mechanical valve in the suspension dampers allows it to soften up around town and stiffen up at speed for more stability. Whatever the oily bits are doing, the result is a pleasingly soft ride. Sure, the EV3 won't be setting lap times and the 201hp motor between the front wheels can't post a ridiculous 0-62mph time, but for every driving situation outside of an icy race track, it's more than good enough.

Rivals such as the Volvo EX30 may be a tad more stylish inside and out, but no other car can match the EV3 on every front: affordable list price, practicality, maximum driving range and sense of quality. Kia's played a blinder here.

You might think the EV3's going to be tight inside given it's the brand's entry-level EV. But the cabin's wider than all its rivals and the EV3's wheelbase is the same as the bigger Kia Sportage. So there's plenty of room for all inhabitants. You sit a little higher than in a normal hatchback but it doesn't feel like a hulking great SUV, and the result is it's easy to place on the road.

Each version of the EV3 – and there's Air, GT Line and GT Line S – gets twin 12.3-inch screens on the dashboard, as well as a 5.3-inch screen for climate control functions. The latter is sadly blocked from view by the steering wheel, which means you'll probably forget it exists.

Luckily the central infotainment screen is sharp, easy to use and the built-in navigation didn't lead us astray too many times while driving the EV3 around Lisbon's motorway network, which was laid out by a psychopath with a penchant for putting as many junctions as close together as possible. But we digress. Built-in wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto mean you can use your preferred navigation and music apps, and the standard-fit sound system is plenty good enough. GT Line S models get an eight-speaker Harman Kardon setup, but these top-spec EV3s are expensive at £43,000, resulting in a £600/year tax bill from 2025.

Other infotainment features include an upcoming software update to add ChatGPT so you can ask your car to provide ridiculous crowd-sourced facts, and Kia's adding Disney+, Netflix, YouTube, SoundCloud and Amazon Music integrations to while away the hours when you're charging. You can also set up a system to pay for parking from within the infotainment screen.

Oh, and you can set up your favourite sports teams and get real-time score updates – even on the navigation screen. It’s like teletext for Gen Z-ers. If you’re a WhatsApp voice note person, you’ll find the voice memo function useful, too. Well, maybe. Everything’s configurable, even down to the strength you need to press the dashboard touch buttons.

Perhaps more usefully, all EV3s get heated front seats, a heated steering wheel, a reversing camera, all-round parking sensors and a blind-spot warning system. Top nerd points go to Kia for building a new slim HVAC system for the air-con, so your front-seat passenger gets an extra 6cm of legroom.

If that wasn't handy enough, the centre armrest has a slide-out table which Kia reckons allows you to work from a laptop in the front seats, but you'd be so twisted you'd need an osteopath after 10 minutes. It does look a handy size for using as a lunch table – or even changing a nappy… hopefully not at the same time!

You can also spec relaxation seats which fully recline at the touch of a button, and GT Line S models get ventilated front seats too. Finally, you can use your phone as a key for the car and share it with up to seven other people.

Material choice is good, with soft cloth leather seats in entry-level Air models, and artificial leather in GT Line and GT Line S models. The doors feel a bit cheap in parts but there’s a nice metallic-effect trim piece, and GT Line variants get tactile fabric on the dashboard. Impressively, the Kia’s interior feels better built and more convincing than the Volvo EX30’s pared-back cabin.

Kia expects the vast majority of buyers to go for GT Line trim, but it still hasn’t skimped on the entry-level Air model. You get an attractive blue-and-grey interior trim – there’s no dour grey-on-grey cloth here.

A huge amount of the cabin materials are made from recycled materials, including lots of the paint. There's a QR code on the glove box which you can scan to find out more about Kia's reuse of materials. We can forgive a few cheap bits here and there if we think we’re saving the world.

Despite measuring in at 4.3m long – that's 10cm shorter than Kia's own Niro EV – the EV3 smashes its older sibling for interior space.

Big adults can comfortably sit up front, even with the GT Line S model's front sunroof (your back-seat passengers are left in the dark, sadly). There's room for a big bottle in the front doorbins but precious little else as the door bins quickly narrow to a size that's only useful for Mars bars.

The clever sliding centre armrest doesn't actually adjust to a comfortable angle when you're driving, nor does it have any storage space within it – Air trim misses out on the desk for extra storage space – but there's a pair of cupholders and loads of space for your phone in front of it. The glovebox is plenty big enough for your de-icer and ice-scraper for the colder months.

In the back seats there's enough room for our 6'3" test subject to sit behind his own driving position, and headroom is just fine too. 

Unlike many EVs, rear-seat passengers in the EV3 won't feel like their feet are trapped between a high floor and low front seat, and there's space enough for a big bottle in the rear door bins. A flat floor means the middle-rear seat is actually usable. A pair of USB-C sockets on the sides of the front seats will let your kids charge their tablets up for a non-stop stream of road-trip Paw Patrol. No job is too big, no pup is too small, etc.

Also useful for family duties is the EV3's big boot. At 460 litres it's above average for the class and has an adjustable boot floor so you can remove the load lip – ideal for sliding heavy objects in and out without rupturing your spleen. Downsides? The tailgate is only electrically operated on top-spec GT Line S models, and the parcel shelf is too big to fit under the boot floor when not in use, so you'll have to leave it at home.

Finally, we should mention the Kia EV3's frunk. It has a 25-litre cubbyhole under the bonnet which is ideal for keeping your charging cables.

Whichever of the EV3's two battery sizes you pick, you get the same front-wheel drive motor setup with 201hp and 283Nm of torque. You'll crack the 0-62mph sprint in 7.5 seconds in the normal-range car and 7.7 seconds in the long-range version. That doesn't sound all that quick, but it's fast enough and you've always got ample acceleration available when you're already rolling. 

Getting up to motorway speeds isn't a chore – you don't really think about it thanks to the instantaneous accelerator response. Kia's put extra stiffening ribs around the motor as well as extra sound deadening materials, and the result is a vibration and noise-free experience no matter how hard you press the throttle – there's just no motor whine in the cabin.

In terms of charging speeds, the smaller 58.3kWh battery can charge at up to 102kW, while the bigger 81.4kWh version can charge at 129kW. On a 150kW public fast charger you'll get from 10-80% charge in 29 minutes with the smaller battery, and 31 minutes with the large battery. Kia's at pains to point out the EV3's charging curve means it'll add more miles per minute of charging than any of its direct rivals. 

All EV3s also get vehicle-to-load and vehicle-to-grid capability, so you can plug in a three-pin appliance and run it off the car, or – in future – put power back into your house from the car.

Where nearly every other electric SUV at this price point crashes over bumps around town, the EV3 fairly glides. It's comfortably the… most comfortable EV in its class, thanks to composed suspension and a reasonably light weight of 1,800kg. On a twisty road it rolls a bit in corners but not alarmingly so, and although the drive could never be described as sporty, it's competent enough to let you go down a twisty B-road at 60mph without the fear of death.

You don’t need to worry about the GT Line cars’ bigger wheels ruining the ride comfort – we noticed no difference in the ride quality between Air and GT Line models.

The steering is quick and accurate, but light and numb – reminding you that this is a car for mundane daily journeys, not crack-of-dawn Sunday escapes.

The town driving experience, meanwhile, is marred only by big blind spots at the rear corners of the car, and once you're up to motorway speeds the cabin is reasonably serene, with very little wind or road noise entering the cabin, and almost zero noise from the electric motor by your feet. 

In fact the most annoying thing about the EV3's driving experience is an illuminated strip on the dashboard that runs in front of the passenger as well as the driver and flashes red when you're speeding – it's guaranteed to have your kids dobbing you in to your other half. 

The paddles behind the steering wheel can adjust the car's levels of regenerative braking, with one-pedal driving now also possible in reverse. The EV3 is also the first Kia to remember which level you had it set on when you last drove the car… we're not sure why it's taken this long to work that one out, but there we are. Hold the right-hand paddle and you'll find a new auto mode for the brake regen, which will use the car's mapping data and sensors to automatically adjust the brake regen. It's a bit clunkier in action than BMW's similar system, but it's still useful enough to help you coast down for unseen speed-limit changes.