Kia Sorento GT-Line PHEV review: I’ve never felt so free

When I borrow a press car I know a PR person will judge me based on how I’ve treated it. But in the case of this Kia, I drove it in the spirit of someone wearing a T-shirt saying ‘Dance like no one is watching’.

While I was amused by the hire car experience, I can’t wait to get home and climb into someone else’s nice, new and unsullied car, writes Stephen Corby.

Can an adult be “spoilt”, or is it purely a child thing? I’m asking because I am often accused, generally by men who are obsessed with cars, of being a “spoilt prick”, which, if you roll it around your mind’s eye for a moment, sounds particularly unpleasant.

These men tend to assume that I have driven every kind of car there is, and that I have highway patrol officers who give me exemptions to drive as fast as I like, but the fact is I’ve never driven a Ferrari F40, a Bugatti or a Pagani, or even a Chevrolet Corvette.

And, I recently realised, there’s another popular yet infamous kind of vehicle that I’d never engaged with: the hire car (I don’t want to pour fire on the spoilt flames, but I only travel to drive other people’s vehicles). I had read about them in the amusing words of the late American satirist PJ O’Rourke, an occasional car enthusiast. “Nothing handles better than a rented car,” he wrote. “You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind. You can also park without looking, and use the trunk as an ice chest.”

A colleague and I had flown into New Zealand to do some vital research into global warming (to wit, “Is it still possible to ski in August, because it sure seems warm?”) and picked up a Kia Sorento at Queenstown Airport where we were informed that fuel was going to cost us about $3.50 a litre, and if we didn’t fill the Kia up before returning it the hire company would charge us $4.50 a litre to do so.

We were informed that fuel was going to cost us about $3.50 a litre.

After hearing this news I assumed we’d see financially flattened Kiwis walking or cycling everywhere, and streets littered with unused vehicles, but I was relieved to learn that our Sorento was a plug-in hybrid EV and thus theoretically frugal. Before setting off, I noticed that hire cars age like dogs: our Kia had only a few thousand kilometres on it, yet gave off the exhausted air of having been driven to the Moon and back. I wouldn’t say it was dirty (although it did look like it had spent the day lounging in a mud bath when we returned it) but it had the same sense that a teenager’s bedroom has, of never really being properly clean. Still, the surfaces in the car – which have a certain stylistic classiness in parts – seemed to have worn surprisingly well, considering they’d clearly been treated with the same level of love and care that people apply to public bathrooms. I was particularly thrilled to find it had heated seats and steering wheel (I assumed hire companies would charge extra to have windows that open, let alone such luxuries).

I was particularly thrilled to find it had heated seats and steering wheel.

I also noticed that I felt wild and free when driving a hire car, although perhaps not as wild as O’Rourke. When I borrow a press car, I know I’ll have to hand it back to a PR person who will judge me, and gossip about me, based on how I’ve treated it, but in the case of the Kia I drove it in the free spirit of someone wearing a T-shirt saying “Dance like no one is watching”.

What I was watching was the fuel gauge and the PHEV system displays. As we thrashed and unkindly whipped this unnecessarily large SUV up some steep and unexpectedly unsealed roads, the Sorento’s 1.6-litre turbo-petrol and its 67kW/304Nm electric motor were working together keenly, and somewhat noisily, to meet our demands. (Perhaps the biggest surprise was how enjoyable NZ’s rally-friendly roads were, even in a big bus like this.)

While we had almost emptied the 13.8kWh lithium-ion battery by the time we reached the Downhill Global Warming Test Facility, the trip back down to the valley floor was very interesting because, by stamping on the brake pedal as if it was covered in spiders, we managed to use the car’s regenerative power systems to boost the battery from 12 per cent to 40 per cent, and our EV-only range from zero to 13km, or just enough to get us from the mountain’s bottom to our hotel.

The Sorento has a silent-running and quite effortless EV range of 57km.

Allegedly, the Sorento has a silent-running and quite effortless EV range of 57km, a number you won’t reach if you drive it like a hire car, but there’s definitely more than enough volts on offer to drive it as an electric vehicle on your daily commute, charge it every day or two via your solar panels and then rely on increasingly expensive fuel only for longer journeys or mountain climbs. The official fuel-efficiency figure for this Kia is 1.6L/100km, which would sound very tempting to a New Zealander, but then officially I have 464 friends (according to Facebook), which is a similarly wild exaggeration.

Still, every kilometre of fuel-free motoring we were able to extract from our hard-working and hard-worn hire car, in a country where petrol is priced like liquid gold, felt like a huge win. While I was amused by the hire car experience, and may have attempted to park it with my eyes closed, I can’t wait to get home and climb into someone else’s nice, new and unsullied car.

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Kia Sorento GT-Line PHEV

ENGINE: 1.6-litre four cylinder, one electric motor, 13.8kWh battery (195kW/350Nm)
FUEL ECONOMY: 1.6 litres per 100km
TRANSMISSION: Six-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
PRICE: $81,080
RATING: Three-and-a-half stars out of five