Kia EV9 Review 2024

Kia EV9 At A Glance

4/5
Honest John Overall Rating
The seven-seat, all-electric Kia EV9 has a lot going for it: futuristic good looks, an enormous, practical cabin, and the longest range of any seven-seat EV on sale in the UK (not that there’s much competition). It is, however, expensive.

+Spacious in all three rows. Well equipped. Class-leading range.

-Expensive. Interior not quite premium enough. Too many bings and bongs.

The all-electric, seven-seater Kia EV9 is the largest vehicle in the brand’s UK line-up and, sitting above the Kia Sorento – which has seven seats, but is not available as an electric car – is its new flagship SUV. Read on for our full Kia EV9 review.

If you want to haul seven people around with a fully electric powertrain in something that isn’t merely an electrified van, there’s the Mercedes EQB and… er, until the Volvo EX90 breaks cover, that’s pretty much it.

So now that the Kia EV9 is here, how does its practicality, price and performance stack up against the vanguard of seven-seater vans?

The stylish Volkswagen ID.Buzz properly painted in retro, two-tone Combi colours excepted, the Kia EV9 is far better looking than any van. It nicely combines a gently rufty-tufty, roof-railed image with modern detailing such as intelligent LED lighting, aero wheel covers and electrically propelled flush door handles.

On board, it’s positively cavernous. Seven seats are standard fare, with a six-seat format available on the top-of-the-range variant.

In this guise, the second row seats swivel through both 90 and 180 degrees, the former handy for installing nippers in child seats, the latter for lounging while recharging.

The third row seats are good for proper headroom and legroom – a surprising rarity in the world of seven-seater SUVs – assisted by the second row bench fitted in seven-seat format versions sliding forward and backwards.

As ever with seven-seaters, loadspace is quite restricted with all the seats in place – it’s limited to just 300 litres. But both the third and second rows may be folded flat via loadspace sidewall-mounted controls, offering as much as a whopping, van-like 2318 litres.

Boasting a high proportion of sustainable eco-friendly materials, the cabin quality is not to be sniffed at, but it would undoubtedly feel slightly more premium if it wasn’t so unremittingly mid-grey in colour. 

A 12.3-inch digital cockpit and equally sized central touchscreen are fitted as standard throughout the range, and they’re separated by a smaller, 5.3-inch panel dedicated to the car’s climate control system.

This would be a better idea if it was not almost entirely hidden by the steering wheel rim. However, there’s also handful of proper switches to control temperature, fan speed and the like.

The Kia EV9 is offered in a choice of Air, GT-Line or GT-Line S specifications in the UK, with Air featuring rear-wheel drive, and both GT-Line versions equipped with all-wheel drive. A seven-seat format is standard across the range, with the posh, six-seat alternative available on GT-Line S trim cars. 

Standard equipment levels are pleasingly high in even the least expensive Air grade, and include LED lights throughout, a power tailgate, three-zone climate control, electric and heated everything, a new digital key and fingerprint recognition, wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay connectivity and wireless smartphone charging.

But then, with even this cheapest car in the range costing £65,025, you’d expect plenty of toys.

The Kia EV9’s rear- and all-wheel-drive powertrains produce 203PS and 383PS respectively. The former oozes smoothly to 62mph in – by EV standards - a leisurely 9.4 seconds, while the dual-motor variant dispatches the sprint in a heady 5.3 seconds.

There is, of course, a price to pay for this; the quoted range of the car drops from the single motor variant’s 349 miles to 313, although this is still a pretty healthy range for such a big machine.

One of only a few EVs on sale with 800-volt charging capability, the Kia EV9 can harness high DC power to recharge the battery from 10% to 80% in only 24 minutes.

Out on the road, the emphasis is on ride comfort. Largely this is successful, the suspension only giving away the weight of a car that tips the scales at over 2600kg with an occasional thump over the roughest patches of road.

The steering is light and the car does roll somewhat through bends. Although selecting Sport from the drive modes does beef up the steering a little, it’s very artificial in feel and doesn’t encourage you to try and hustle this huge car through corners any more quickly.

As a motorway cruiser, the Kia EV9 proves a smooth, pleasingly quiet place to be, with well damped road noise and wind noise becoming increasingly dominant due to that boxy shape.

With no direct rivals to compare it to other than a Mercedes with very cramped third-row accommodation, the two-tone Volkswagen ID.Buzz and a bunch of vans with relatively dreadful range between charges, the Kia EV9 has to win over those requiring a seven-seat EV SUV on merit alone.

We think it does a pretty good job of that in the practicality, comfort and range stakes. But it’ll be interesting to see how its steep pricing – from £65,025 to an eye-watering £78,775 - stacks up against the array of rivals which, inevitably, will shortly be with us.