With so many switches, driving this car is like flying a plane

I disliked this car intensely at first, but then ended up driving more than 600km in it – after which it still had a third of a tank of fuel left, thanks to its clever hybrid set-up.

Stephen Corby

3 min read

7:00PMSeptember 19, 2024

The Weekend Australian Magazine

I did feel a very tiny bit like a pilot while driving the Kia Sorento for a week.

How hard can flying a plane be? With cars increasingly infested with autopilot, and autonomous features like steering wheels that try to wrestle control from you as if they’ve decided you’re too old for the task, driving must surely be getting closer to piloting.

From what I’ve observed, a lot of flying involves flicking many, many switches on and off (I once had a semi crash-landing in a tiny plane in Mongolia on a dinosaur-digging trip, where the pilots were consulting a laminated folder of instructions on which switches needed attention as we approached the grass-and-boulder runway). Helicopters have even more switches, possibly because they are cooler and more challenging machines. Mick Doohan, the former motorcycle racing world champion (and a huge hero of mine) who now sells private jets, told me that he went to the trouble of getting his fixed-wing pilot’s licence, but then only used it once because flying planes was a bit dull. “I prefer choppers – they’re more like riding a motorcycle,” he said.

I did feel a very tiny bit like a pilot while driving the Kia Sorento for a week. I fell into this car by accident (because the McLaren supercar I was supposed to be testing blew up, putting me in an unusually critical mood), and I disliked it intensely at first, but then ended up driving more than 600km in it – after which it still had a third of a tank of fuel left, thanks to its clever hybrid set-up.

Inside the Kia Sorento GT-Line HEV AWD.

My first mistake was not worrying about the buttons and switches enough; this meant that I mistakenly drove it for the first few days in its default “Eco” mode, which is a bit like drinking beer without knowing it’s alcohol-free (this is impossible, obviously, because it would suggest your tastebuds were broken, but you get the idea). In a desperate effort to always be in the most economical gear, the Sorento’s gearbox seemed to attempt to be in all of them at once – a kind of quantum mechanics superposition, yet more mysterious. Which is to say I think I understand quantum theory better than I do the busy buzzing of this Eco setting.

(In another feat of possibly quantum weirdness, every time I walked away from the Sorento I forgot what it looked like; an image of it simply wouldn’t stay in my head. If challenged to draw a word picture I would say “lumpy” or just “large-ish”, which is strange, because most modern Kias are quite striking, and the EV9 in particular is stunning.)

Fortunately, after playing with the shift paddles to calm myself, I found I could flick a switch to access something called “Smart” mode, and another named “Sport”, which should actually be marked as “Loud”.

The Sorento could definitely do with more power than the 169kW its 1.6-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine provides.

“Smart” mode seemed to genuinely be what it says on the label – a rare thing in car-company speak. No matter how I drove, the car just seemed to get me, and this somehow made its transmission almost entirely not annoying. I called up a Kia boffin who explained to me that the Smart mode is using an algorithm to measure my driving inputs and adapt the gearbox’s “smart logic” (and the steering feel) to whether I’m in a sporty or relaxed kind of mood. It’s also capable of switching between those two moods as quickly as I do.

And so, for the rest of the week, every time I set out in the Sorento I would switch from Eco to Smart, before going through various other switches, screens and buttons to turn off the infuriatingly annoying Speed Limit Alert Loud Beeping system (in Australia we have to put up with this because beeping at people who are speeding has been made compulsory in Europe, where Kia sells far more cars). And then a few more to turn off the Lane Keep Assist safety feature, which thinks it knows better than I do where the apex of a corner is, and uses servo motors to push the steering wheel against my hands, and against my will.

After adjusting my tie, doffing my natty pilot’s hat and making a few safety announcements to my passengers, I was generally ready to set off in about five minutes, which is a lot faster than it seems to take to get a Virgin flight moving.

Once I got out on the road, and in Smart mode, I actually found this big, capacious seven-seat SUV surprisingly enjoyable to pilot, with the kind of steering that makes it feel like you’re actually driving rather than just sleepwalking through life.

The Sorento could definitely do with more power than the 169kW its 1.6-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine provides, but then people who buy large family SUVs are possibly more concerned about fuel economy than fizzing excitement – and this one genuinely seems capable of achieving its claimed 5.7 litres per 100km fuel-economy figure, thanks to the fact that it’s a HEV (that’s Hybrid Electric Vehicle). And you don’t even have to drive in Eco all the time to do so, thank goodness.