Kia Sportage GT-Line S Hybrid review: No one wants fun from their car anymore

Very few cars are fast or fun or exciting any more — just take a look at this boring, practical Kia SUV. What on earth has happened to us?

More of the same: the Kia Sportage GT-Line S Hybrid

While sitting in the perma-traffic jam that clogs up the A40 in western London the other day, I had time for a good look round and I realised that I hated every single car I could see. There was some kind of MG SUV, the usual array of Toyota Priuses, the inevitable Tesla, and a boxy Ford that had exactly the same number of outstanding features as a sheet of absolutely nothing at all. And not one of these cars had been built to be fast or fun or exciting in any way.

When I first started writing about cars, fun was really all that mattered. And fun was measured in terms of how quickly the car got from zero to 60 miles an hour. Even Morris banged on about this, saying their new Ital could accelerate faster than a Saab. I once bought a Scirocco GLi because Car magazine said it could do the 0 to 60 sprint in 8.1 seconds, which meant it was better in every way than my mate’s Chevette HS, which took 8.2s. We’d argue about that one-tenth for hours because we knew that the faster your car accelerated, the better and more attractive you were as a person.

I don’t have a clue what’s caused the change in attitude, but no one seems to want fun from their family cars anymore. They just want USB ports. Which brings us to the car I was driving in that traffic jam on the A40. It was a Kia Sportage GT hybrid, which had two USB ports in the front and one behind each front seat. You even get a choice of port; USB or USB-C. This, then, is a car where everyone can be connected, so who cares that it takes about a year to get from 0 to 60?

There are other gimmicks to distract you, such as a wraparound glass dashboard that looks like the sort of thing CIA tech people in Jason Bourne movies look at when they’re tracking his movements from space. I pushed one button and the screen showed me which motor was driving the wheels at any given moment – the electric motor in the back or the petrol engine at the front. I couldn’t really see the point of this. I was then deeply irritated, when the traffic eased, by the car’s insistence that it could steer round corners better than me. To try to turn the system off, I had first to work out how to change the heater controls into controls for the screen. Luckily the car did all the steering while I did this.

Then it did some more steering while I went through every one of the 10 options on the screen. Having established that I couldn’t use any of them to stop the car steering itself, I tried all of the buttons on the steering wheel until eventually a little green light on the dashboard went off. I appreciate that a car that can steer itself could be useful if you nod off or you’re distracted by someone in the back who can’t find the USB port. But it is very un-useful when a bus is heading straight for you on your side of the road and you need to stray over the white line to miss it. When this happened to me, the Kia did its damnedest to have a head-on collision.

To drive? Who cares, really? No one who’s interested in a Korean SUV, that’s for sure. I can tell you that in “Sport” mode the engine makes a terrible noise when it’s stretched, and that at slow speeds the brakes make a weird groaning noise. The sort of sound an old person makes when he’s getting out of a chair. It’s safe to say that the engineers who, in the past, would have been working on handling and braking and power delivery were instead making a handy charging station for the driver’s iPhone, cup holders and a parcel shelf that can be stored under the boot floor.

Since Kia took the Sportage away, I’ve been trying to work out whether it’s a good car or not. It doesn’t do a single thing that I consider important well. It’s almost wilfully boring. But does this matter anymore? Are we now more bothered by connectivity and economy and the ability to change the colour of the interior lighting? If we are, then the Kia is fine. But is it better than a VW Tiguan or an MG HS or a Hyundai Tucson or a Skoda Enyaq or a Nissan Kumquat or a Ford Kuga or a BMW X3 or a Peugeot 3008 or a Seat Ateca or a Honda CR-V or a Mazda CX-5 or a Toyota RAV4 or a Citroën C5 Aircross? The list goes on.

Motoring journalists used to work out which car felt the best, and which was the most exciting, the most comfortable and the most practical. He or she would try to fathom the unmeasurable and then make a decision based on how quickly the car got from 0 to 60. Now, people only want to know which one has the most USB ports. You don’t need a motoring journalist for that. But I can tell you: it’s the Chevrolet Traverse, which has seven. So buy one of those.

Kia Sportage GT-Line S Hybrid

Engine: 1.6-litre turbo four-cylinder petrol plus 1.49kWh battery (total 169kW/350Nm). Estimated fuel 6 litres per 100km.

Transmission: Six-speed automatic front-wheel drive

Price: N/A. Hybrid TBC in Australia; GT-Line AWD petrol from $49,370

Stars: 3 out of 5