A review of the Kia EV6

I just spent four days in Kansas City with a Kia EV6 rental car. It's something I've always wanted to drive and frequently considered as my next daily driver someday.

Upfront, I want to state that I don't have any reflexive disgust for Kia that a lot of people I know do. They remember early Kias that hit American shores in the early 2000s and how cheaply made and unreliable they generally were.

But I've been a big fan of Kia and Hyundai (they merged sometime around 2010 IIRC) for the past ten years because whenever I get one as a rental car, it's way nicer inside than I thought, and everything just works quickly and easily. And friends have told me if you think the interiors look like a BMW, it's because Kia hired many BMW engineers that worked on the M line of cars there (probably why Hyundai calls their sporty models the N line),

That all said, I think this car has a lot of flaws that annoyed the shit out of me over the course of four days, but if I owned it long-term I might get used to them. It makes me think this car was rushed to market with a bunch of bad ideas baked in but it's been out for several years now, so I hope they fix things for the next minor revision of the car.

What sucks about the EV6

I jotted down some notes whenever I encountered something annoying about the car. Here they are:

The center buttons in the dash switch between climate control and media control and that is BONKERS

There's a central touch-screen panel that controls the climate including the heating and AC vents with two big blue-to-red dials to set temps and a cabin temperature readout.

But if you hit a small button in the middle of the ~20 buttons, all touch button labels change to control the media center. This is: a) insane and b) I don't know how it went to market like this.

Just make the display panel another inch tall to display both lines of buttons at once. Don't make people have to look down at touch buttons while driving a 5,000lb car just because you can change the labels easily.

Stereo stuff

When the center display buttons were in that climate control mode, there's no physical volume controls anywhere on the dash. Literally no up/down button or knobs anywhere next to the main center screen. Only the steering wheel rocker could control the stereo volume if you had climate controls showing.

To fast forward a song with the steering wheel media controls, you tap DOWN on a rocker button to go FORWARD to the next track. I've literally never experienced this in any media controller or remote in any context before in my life. Pushing "up" usually means "go to the next highest numbered track" so it always felt backwards.

The car has two USB ports at the bottom of the center stack. One is USB A and one is USB C. The car doesn't have wireless CarPlay, which is fine, but the manual says plugging a cable into either port would fire up wired CarPlay, but it didn't. Only the USB A port worked for CarPlay.

The worst part? I ducked into a gas station to buy a cheap USB-A to C cable and the first one, still brand new right out of the package would work for a second then immediately disconnect, then repeat the process (maybe it was a charge only, no data cable?). We stopped at a pharmacy and bought another USB-A to USB-C cable that was labeled as charge plus data and it worked. Official usb-c to usb-c cables from Apple didn't work in the car for CarPlay.

Also when you plug in your phone and start the car, the big central display screen stays in a default "media off" screen until you go into a menu and tap CarPlay to start. This was annoying every time we turned the car off, because we often needed Google Maps to come up asap to know which way to drive in a strange city, but it would waste 30 seconds to "enable" it when the car started. No other car I've ever used with CarPlay acts like this, they always just dump you into CarPlay after a few seconds of boot-up time.

Finally, I think we drove the low end "Wind" trim line of EV6 and it must not come with a subwoofer because the car audio sound was some of the worst I've heard in a modern vehicle. Back in the late 1980s and 1990s I would stuff my car with a couple thousand watts of amp power and build custom speaker boxes out of MDF to get decent music playback. Sometime around 2010, stock car stereos got so generally good in almost all brands of cars that I barely mess with speakers in cars these days.

But the Kia EV6 sounded weak and tinny and completely void of any bass like it was a car from the 1980s. With the bass all the way cranked up, it still sounded bad and tinny. The only other audio tweak it offered was to make it sound like you were in a cavernous hall with sound waves echoing everywhere. I don't know anyone who actually wants that and it made rock music sound terrible. Anyway, the stereo sound sucks and that was super weird considering almost any car today usually comes with a stereo that sounds pretty decent.

A grab bag of annoyances

It was louder than most EVs. It's still quieter than any gas combustion car but there's a lot of fake sci-fi engine noises that are piped in when you push the gas pedal and at stoplights the car wasn't eerily quiet like every other EV I've driven.

The center console controls put the vented seats button right on the corner of it and I accidentally hit it twice in a few days and let me tell you when it's 30ºF outside and you're driving on a freeway and suddenly ice cold air is blasting up and down your spine, it can really freak you out as it took a few beats to figure out how to turn it off so I could begin defrosting myself. I've never owned a car with vented seats and twice in rentals I've accidentally fired them off at full blast and it's pretty shocking how well they work, but hard to find the off button to make it stop.

Automatic regeneration—when you take your foot off the gas to coast—was a little stronger than I expected. There was a special one-pedal-driving option that REALLY dragged the car to a quick stop any time you lifted off the gas pedal, but even when you turned it all off, it still didn't coast like a gas car.

Safety-wise, I was surprised it didn't have 360º cameras when parking and when you change lanes, I'm used to every Hyundai product having blind spot cameras that show up in the speedometer screen when you turn on a blinker, but this Kia didn't have that either. Minor, but it was still a thing I noticed.

What was good about the EV6

Even though the car was louder inside than other EVs I've driven, when we flew home and jumped in our family Volvo SUV, we thought we left one of the windows cracked open once we got up to freeway speeds. That means our quiet luxurious gas car sounded super loud compared to what we drove for the previous four days, so that's a good sign our "normal" car has a ton of noise we don't regularly notice.

It was fast as most EVs are, and could get to 60mph in just a few seconds which made freeway on-ramps in a strange town a lot easier to merge onto.

It was comfy inside and generally had nice materials. If the dash and center console controls had a better, more straightforward user interface, I'd recommend this car to everyone as a good city car that can go over a couple hundred miles and recharge quickly.

On a scale of 1-10, I'd give the Kia EV6 a solid 7.

Honestly, I expected more after driving other Kias and Hyundais and I think with some tweaks, they could have a way better car on their hands.