Is the EV9 the King of Kias? Or a hearse for a robot

If you watched even a minute of the Australian Open then you’ve seen the ads. Now find out if Kia’s Blade Runner-esque EV9 is actually any good.

‘Kia is selling a vehicle for more than $120k, the world hasn’t come to an end and people are actually queuing up to buy it.’

Stephen Corby

3 min read

12:00AMJanuary 30, 2024.

Updated 8:31AMJanuary 30, 2024

The Weekend Australian Magazine

Have you ever seen a bus driver smile? To be fair, why would they? I know that, personally, I would be constitutionally unsuited to carrying large numbers of strangers around in a vehicle that’s designed to infuriate other road users and never, ever get you where you want to go on time.

This is not just because I hate public transport almost as much as I despise opinionated, bile-filled magazine columnists, but because I am physically incapable of driving any kind of vehicle if there are random rattling or rolling noises going on.

I can cope with music and even dull conversation, but if there is so much as a coin rattling in someone’s pocket in the back seat, or an empty tin vibrating in a door, I will be forced to pull over and tear the vehicle apart to seek and destroy the source before I can continue. Put me in control of a bus filled with passengers staring at their screens as Big Gulp cups and Red Bull cans roll endlessly and painfully along the filthy floor and I would soon wear the dead-fish-eyed stare of the typical bus driver/serial killer.

It was with some hesitance, then, that I agreed to drive the new Kia EV9, a vehicle that might not actually be classified as a bus, but only because it’s too large. Strictly speaking, the EV9 is a seven-seat SUV, but it looks and feels large enough to run the 442 route.

‘The EV9 resembles an armoured van designed by the concept artists who worked on Blade Runner’

Remarkably, however, it is far better looking than any city bus, with a kind of muscular angularity that achieves the notionally impossible: making a vehicle the size of a small house look good. To me, the EV9 resembles an armoured van designed by the concept artists who worked on Blade Runner, but my mother pointed out that it could also be a hearse for a robot. Inside, it feels surprisingly expensive and premium with the kind of plush headrests for driver and passengers that are normally found in European limousines. There is also a vast amount of room for everyone – even an adult could sit in the third row without losing feeling below the knees – and a suitably large but edgily shaped steering wheel.

My wife, who had to use a step-ladder and a sherpa to get into the EV9, was surprised to find that she quite liked driving it, in particular the excellent ride quality, effortless electric thrust and relaxing levels of quietude – but she was put off by not being able to see very well out of it, and the fact that she couldn’t tell where the corners were, possibly because they were so far away.

I, too, found the king of Kias to be far easier to drive than its proportions would suggest. By some fluke, I happened to be driving some strangers around town that week, just like a real bus driver, but unlike them I had great power at my disposal (283kW and 700Nm) and proceeded to use it with great irresponsibility. Two of my passengers had never been in an EV before, so I scared them quite horribly by engaging Sport mode and flapping my right foot wildly.

Inside the Kia EV9.

For them, I imagine the experience of moving from zero to 100km/h in just six seconds in something so vast was like jumping on a merry-go-round and finding that your pole-dancing horse was accelerating like an actual thoroughbred.

It could have been even more scary, because I was in the mid-tier Earth variant ($106,500, 512km of range), which misses out on the Acceleration Boost function you get in the top-spec GT-Line ($121,000, 505km range), which somehow allows all this vehicle to hit 100km/h in 5.3 seconds, which is hot-hatch fast, and verging on the obscene.

Now let’s all just pause for a moment and consider that I just related the fact that Kia is selling a vehicle for more than $120k, the world hasn’t come to an end and people are actually queuing up to buy it (the base model, the rear-wheel-drive Air, is “just” $97,000). We live in strange times.

Like all modern Korean cars, the EV9 annoyed me no end by beeping every time I slightly exceeded a speed limit, which it’s hard not to do when you’re driving an ICBM, but that aside I found piloting it strangely pleasing. That was until I found myself driving into a typical city car park and realised that once I’d started turning the EV9’s cruise-ship sized bulk towards a space I completely lost sight of the painted lines on the ground. Kia obviously suspected this might be a problem because a camera feed popped up on the central screen showing me where, far beneath us, the parking slot actually was, but I still felt like I had about as much chance of getting it right in one go as I would if I attempted to navigate a black hole.

As buses go, I liked the Kia EV9 a lot, but it’s clearly not a vehicle for someone who thinks an SUV is God’s way of punishing you for having too many kids.

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