Kia Niro GT-Line Electric 2022 |Drive

You’ll know if you’re a regular Drive reader that Kia’s first take on the Niro EV was a little late to the party. Using the term ‘a little’ might actually be too generous. It was really late to the party. Its own party, as a matter of fact.

See, due to a range of different factors, what would have been an almost certain success in our market if it were available earlier, launched with the intention that it would only be with us for two years or so.

And, to make matters worse, the Kia EV6 arrived not long after. And we know how good that vehicle is…

Unfortunately, then, the first Niro EV looked a little conservative despite being well executed, and didn’t gain the traction in the market it otherwise might have. Things have changed now, though, with the second-generation model, and it starts with the exterior styling.

The Niro EV absolutely looks the part now, significantly more stylish than the old model, it cuts an eye-catching figure on the road, is riding on a new platform under the skin, features more standard safety kit, and is priced more sharply. What’s not to like? Kia will be hoping not much.

Size-wise, think Seltos in the Kia family lineage, but it’s not a Seltos platform. The Niro EV shares Hyundai’s i30 Sedan platform – yes you read that right, the sedan – and if you’ve read our reviews on that car you’ll know we’re fans of the way it performs on our roads. Off to a good start then.

There’s also a petrol-electric hybrid Niro if the EV is a step too far, but I like the fact it looks like a small SUV, and doesn’t try too hard to scream its electric credentials.

What the Niro EV does have is a sense of individual style – classy light signatures front and rear, and the optional contrasting finish on the C-pillar ensure you’ll notice a Niro EV on the street. Let’s find out if it drives as impressively as its styling would leave you hoping it might.

The Niro range is pretty simple – two hybrids and two fully electric variants. The plug-in hybrid (PHEV) is gone, which is a shame really, because Aussie buyers don’t give PHEVs the credit they probably deserve as a real-world step between internal combustion and electric.

In any case, there’s one less model to choose from now. The two hybrids, S and GT-Line, cost $44,380 and $50,030 respectively before on-road costs.

The Niro EV is also available in S and GT-Line grades, starting from $65,300 and $72,100 respectively, also before on-road costs. Here, we’re testing the range-topping GT-Line as the example of what you get if you can afford all the fruit.

Yes, the Niro EV is expensive in relation to the hybrid Niro or internal combustion SUVs of the same size, but this new model is smack bang in line with the likes of the Polestar 2 and Tesla Model 3.

Different in style and size, the Niro EV sits slightly below Kia’s popular EV6 and also eschews futuristic styling for a more conservative look. I reckon that point is one of the Niro’s strongest – especially if you prefer to roll around town in anonymity.

Kia’s design team have still been a little bold with some of the details, but overall the silhouette is is more readily identifiable as an SUV. Exterior highlights include 17-inch alloy wheels – much better for poor urban roads – auto LED headlights with auto high beam, power mirrors, a sunroof and powered tailgate.

There are benefits to an electric vehicle that sits on a conventional platform, and some downsides. The positives are that you know what you’re getting and the cabin especially feels like a familiar environment.

The negatives are that the engineers haven’t been able to package the vehicle the way they otherwise might in a dedicated EV platform. Think transmission tunnel or provision for driveshafts and axles for example. You don’t need them in an EV and could therefore use that space differently.

So, while the Niro doesn’t have the cabin smarts of the EV6, for example, it is still a comfortable and practical place to be, whether it’s a long drive or a short drive. Similar to the TARDIS-like cabin confines of the Seltos, the Niro actually feels bigger than it is.

The front seats are firm, but firm in a good way. They aren’t uncomfortable even with a few hours under the tyres, so if you can work out your stops, the Niro EV can do the SUV road trip thing quite well.

There’s a heap of storage up front, too, with cupholders that have retractable retainers within them to work with a small cup or no cup at all. There’s also the wireless charging pad, which keeps your smartphone secure into the bargain, and the standard storage bin under the centre console.

The second row will work nicely for family buyers, with plenty of leg and head room even for tall adults. You might be pushing it to sit three adults across the back for too long, but two will ride in comfort. The floor is nearly flat, too, so there’s comfort to be had in the way your feet sit under the front pews.

Back seat occupants get USB-C sockets – in the sides of the backrest rather than low down in the centre console – as well as air vents, a fold-down armrest with cupholders, and bottle holders in the compact door pockets.

Boot space is useful, with 475L available, and when you fold the second row down that expands out to 1392L. There’s also a small storage section up front for charge cables and the like with 20L available there. The powered tailgate makes access to the luggage area easy, and it’s not one of those painfully slow ones either.

The Niro EV’s smartest party trick in GT-Line guise is Kia Connect – which provides owners with remote access to functionality like door locks, climate control, charging information and live traffic updates. It’s also free for seven years.

Further technological wizardry extends to the remote control, which allows you to start the Niro and roll it forward and back. While that latter technology might be a bridge too far for some, it does allow you to squeeze the Niro EV into and out of extremely tight parking garages.

Driver tech is well catered to also, with a 10-inch head-up display that we found to be clear in any light and customisable to display what you want to look at. The digital driver’s display is neatly executed, too, and viewable in any light. The head-up display is the highlight, though. It’s a quality addition that makes the driver’s position feel even more premium than it otherwise might.

We liked the eight-speaker Harman Kardon audio system, and the wireless phone charging worked well also.

The 10.25-inch infotainment screen is set neatly into the GT-Line’s dash and it’s feature-laden with an easy to use menu system, as well as a display that shows what’s going on with the electrical system beneath the skin. There’s wired apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which seems at odds with the wireless charger given you need to connect the phone with the cable to access mirroring anyway.

I prefer a cabled connection, so I didn’t use the wireless charger after testing it early on. On test, the infotainment was, as we’ve come to expect from Kia, reliable and stable.

Kia has hung its hat on safety for a while now, and it’s no surprise the Niro EV scored a full, five-star ANCAP safety rating after local testing. Adult occupant protection rated at 88 per cent, child occupant protection at 84 per cent, vulnerable road user protection at 76 per cent, and safety assist systems at 87 per cent.

Confession time. I like to turn off lane-keep assist in any vehicle I test, and I did exactly that once I’d tested that it worked in the Niro EV. And continued to do it every time I got back into it. So, let’s start with lane-keep assist, which it has standard, and which works well. It can be annoying if you’re trying to avoid a pothole, for example, and it’s trying to drag you back into the direction of it.

You don’t get a five-star safety rating without plenty of standard equipment, and the Niro EV has plenty in GT-Line specification. Seven airbags are standard along with ABS, stability control, traction control, forward collision warning, forward autonomous emergency braking with junction collision avoidance, reverse AEB (not standard on the base S), blind-spot monitoring, lane-departure warning, a rear-view camera, forward cross-traffic alert, reverse cross-traffic alert, exit warning, and a rear seat occupant warning.

As with all Kia models in the line-up in Australia, the Niro comes with a seven-year/unlimited-kilometre warranty – the equal longest of any electric car in Australia, and a continued point of interest for buyers.

Servicing is required every 12 months or 15,000km. Buyers can choose to pay as they go or buy a service plan upfront (helpfully for buyers on a budget, the servicing costs amount to the same price in the end, no matter which option is chosen).

Over five years, the Niro EV costs $1186 to maintain, with an ask of $500 for services in the second, fourth and sixth years – or $1754 for seven years, for an average of $250/year.

That compares favourably to rivals: a BYD Atto 3 costs $1384 over five years/100,000km, and a Hyundai Kona Electric costs $1445 over five years/75,000km – though an MG ZS EV costs $804 over six years/60,000km, or $1611 over eight years/80,000km.

A year of comprehensive insurance coverage will cost about $1825 based on a comparative quote for a 35-year-old male driver living in Chatswood, NSW. Insurance estimates may vary based on your location, driving history, and personal circumstances.

When a manufacturer claims its vehicle uses 16.2kWh/100km and you get a real-world return of 16.4kWh/100km, it’s hard to call it anything but efficient. We didn’t try too hard to be super efficient in the way that we drove, but our mix of regular city driving, with a motorway run thrown in, yielded a return as close to the claim as we would expect to get.

We completed our driving tests with the Niro EV in Normal mode, with the windows up and the AC set to 22 degrees, in an attempt to replicate a ‘regular’ driver as best we could. We also used one-pedal driving mode to eke back as much charge as we could under braking. If you push the Niro EV on the freeway up to 110km/h, you’re likely to see a usage figure of 21kWh/100km.

As we saw with Alex’s recent test of the Niro EV in S trim, Kia’s claim of 460km in terms of range is entirely achievable in the real world, and possibly even beatable, which is clever on the part of Kia. You can see the charging ability of the Niro EV in the table above, and the Niro can take on a maximum of 85kW.

Another string to the Niro EV’s bow is its V2L (or vehicle to load) charging. That means you can use the Niro’s battery pack effectively as a portable generator. It’s a feature more and more electric vehicles will start to offer.

The Niro EV’s unassuming, SUV-like demeanour continues when you get behind the wheel and start driving. That is, it’s a pleasant and entirely inoffensive Kia SUV – it just happens to have an electric powertrain. First up, let’s commend Kia again for the driving range, because a real-world range beyond 400km makes a lot of sense for a lot of buyers.

The single electric motor drives the front wheels and puts out 150kW and 255Nm. Overall power remains the same as the old Niro, but torque has been cut by a hefty 140Nm, and methinks that might be due to the old model’s propensity to light the front tyres up with the merest breath on the accelerator pedal.

Despite the reduction in torque, the Niro doesn’t feel slow. Plus, it’s significantly more sedate out of corners, uphill out of a driveway or cross street, and on a wet road.

The 0–100km/h claim is a spritely 7.8 seconds, and the Niro feels more than fast enough on any road no matter how you drive. If you need to get cracking, it can do so, and the EV speciality of effortless roll-on overtaking is in play at all times. Instant response, and seamless response specifically, is an addictive thing.

You’ll notice the difference between Eco, Normal and Sport. We left the Niro in Normal for almost all of our testing as noted above, but it’s a lot sharper in Sport, and dulled right down in Eco. As expected, then.

I’m not a big fan of Sport modes in electric vehicles, where the goal is to stretch out as much range as you can get, but I guess if you’re trundling mainly around town and you know you’re going home to charge, it doesn’t hurt to have some fun in Sport mode.

As ever, we like the one-pedal driving mode, with the caveat that you’ll need to get used to it if you haven’t tested it before. It means you won’t go through brake pads as quickly either. You can also work your way through three other regenerative braking modes via the paddles on the steering wheel. All of these tweaks are things you’ll work out as you spend time with the Niro and decide what you prefer.

Niro was tuned and fettled to suit our local roads by Kia’s engineers here, and that tuning extends to the weight and response of the steering. Whether they are subtle differences from the global tune, or significant, there’s a lot to be said for a vehicle that is designed to be used here. The ride is firm, especially if you’re on a really choppy surface, but it’s not uncomfortable.

The Niro is a heavy little thing – it does carry a chunky battery pack after all – so you can’t hide 1727kg completely. That’s where some of the firmness on poor surfaces comes from. It is therefore not as light on its feet as either the hybrid would feel or a comparative petrol-engined SUV. That said, you’re not driving this type of vehicle like a sports car either.

The steering tune is excellent, light at low speed and firm up to motorway speeds, with a tight turning circle making for effortless city work. It’s quite manoeuvrable in tight spaces, especially when parking, and that’s a bonus. We also noted that there wasn’t too much road or wind noise, at any speed, even on coarse-chip sections of freeway, which means the cabin ambience isn’t impacted.

We really enjoyed our time with the Kia Niro EV in GT-Line specification. Its pricing – like all electric cars at the moment – means that it’s not easily categorised as ‘affordable’ for most Australian buyers. However, if it does fit within your budget, I’d highly recommend that you add it to your consideration list.

It’s a typically Kia execution of high quality and excellent all-round driving. Not as cutting-edge as the eye-catching EV6, the Niro EV flies under the radar in a much more understated fashion. That’s a good thing, though, and if you want an efficient electric vehicle that is easy to live with, the Niro EV does exactly what you need it to do.