► Kia’s new EV9 electric SUV is here
► Futuristic design, clever interior
► UK sales start in late 2023
The EV9 is a hugely important car for Kia. First revealed in March earlier this year, it was shown once again at the New York International Auto Show. Why? Because it represents the brand’s spearhead into the North American market. The first three-row SUV from Kia, is being built in the States too; Kia has confirmed it’ll be assembled in West Point, Georgia from 2024. That plant will soon be joined by a battery-making facility, too.
The new EV9 is available as a six- or seven-seater, and it’ll take the crown as Kia’s all-electric flagship when it goes on sale towards the end of 2023. ‘It says a lot about Kia and it also pushes the price class up,’ Kia Motors North American COO, Steve Center tells CAR in New York. ‘So this is going to pick up at the top of Telluride, and move up beyond that. It speaks to the change that Kia is undergoing.’
Increasing the premium
The EV9 is the largest most luxurious car from Kia yet, and it’s designed to pull in a very different audience to Kia’s usual one. ‘Telluride was more of a first phase of that for attracting younger wealthier customer, families that want SUVs,’ Center tells CAR magazine. ‘This proves we can do it with an electric car because of the E-GMP platform, and the flexibility that that provides.’
I think we’re going to get [EV9 buyers] from clearly some Kia customers, maybe even some Telluride customers that are happy with their Kia experience, but also all of our competitors in the larger three-row SUVs or even minivan customers and again, younger, wealthier upwardly mobile families.’
Keeping it mainstream
While it might look like a properly premium machine, Kia promises it’s still a mainstream brand. ‘I think this will stay within the DNA of the brand, but just touch upon the boundaries between premium and mainstream – those boundaries are getting more blurred,’ said vice president of brand strategy, Kumasegawa Kaoru, ‘and, obviously, these values will be trickled down into our future line-up.’
The brand has revealed images of the exterior and interior design so far, with more technical specifications expected to follow at a later date. For now, though, let’s dig into the look, feel and tech on offer.
It looks huge!
And, interestingly, extremely close to the Concept EV9 we first saw at the 2021 Los Angeles motor show. CAR understands the EV9 is around five metres in length, making it longer around 200mm longer than the Sorento SUV (Kia’s largest car before this arrived) and a similar length to a Range Rover.
The EV9’s geometrically-inspired lines – from its triangular-shaped, deeply-flared wings and chunkily wraparound windscreen, to the “star map” LEDs and animated digital lighting patterns – add up to a new design approach. Much of which will filter down to its smaller electric cars, and fulfill Kia’s masterplan of having 14 EVs on sale by 2027.
Former-BMW design veteran Karim Habib, who heads up Kia’s design division, cites ‘aerodynamic reasons’ as to why the EV9 has ‘slightly less ground clearance than a normal SUV’, before adding some other justifications. ‘I think that’s partly what makes the car, like the bonnet being shorter, the cabin longer and the beltline low. The beltline is definitely lower than on the concept car. In its glass-to-body proportion, it’s a bit less-classical SUV-like. That was all part of the message of this more ‘living space’ architecture.’
What about the EV9’s interior?
Up front, the EV9 sports one large 27-inch instrument panel combining a trio if slim screens underneath, which Kia’s friendly wizard-like global head of interiors, Jochen Paesen says is a ‘newer generation of screens beyond the EV6, which will be rolled out across the range’. The EV9 also has a new steering wheel with a chamfered top edge to create a shallow, elongated capital “D” shape to make viewing that driver display easier, while all of the key physical driver controls are clustered around the steering column to avoid greater visual clutter elsewhere.
The EV9 is available as a six- or seven-seat version in the UK, and the second row does most of the heavy lifting. In six-seat mode, captain-style chairs are able to swivel rearward 180 degrees and be horizontally offset in relation to the forward-facing third row, so all passengers can find a place to put their legs without clashing kneecaps.
Those second-row seats can also be fixed perpendicular to the rear-door opening to aid frail folks’ exit and entry and there’s a large centre console between the two front seats with a small tray that can extend rearward to place drinks, phones and more.
Marilia Bill, head of the colour, material and finish design team, says the EV9 marks the start of Kia’s phasing out of leather upholstery across its entire range, for example, adding that the brand will ‘increase the amount of plant-based components and, in the future, we plan to go further. We’re investing in something called biofabrication in order to be part of a material revolution by growing our own materials.’
Are there any tech specs you can tell me?
The EV9 runs on Hyundai Motor Group’s e-GMP platform – the architecture that underpins the EV6, as well as Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 and 6. The platform runs an 800-volt architecture for faster charging, and allows for rear- and all-wheel drive versions.
With the EV9, the standard range car has a 76.1kWh battery pack and rear-wheel drive and a ‘Long Range’ model available with rear- or all-wheel drive has a 99.8kWh pack. The thriftiest EV9 is capable of around 336 miles of e-range, while the quickest GT Line model is capable of a 5.3sec 0-62mph time. Kia’s top brass also confirmed there would be an EV9 GT – likely using a similar power output to the EV6 GT – arriving in early 2025.
On top of that, the EV9 can be had (in certain markets) with a remote parallel parking assistant, a platform for new software to be installed over-the-air, a 2500kg towing capacity (matching that of a Range Rover Velar), the ability to power your home (like Ford’s F-150 Lightning) and even vehicle-to-grid power supplementation. Kia also promises Level 3 autonomous technology on board.
Competition
Kia isn’t too worried about competition, because has a combination of product (in the E-GMP) and support (in its dealership network) that its closest competition can’t match at the moment: ‘Not to denigrate Rivian, but we’re a mainstream high volume manufacturer and they’re still struggling getting to scale and manufacturing,’ Center adds.
‘We have the credibility of over 750 dealers around the [US]. And a lot of companies especially with EVs come to the market and say “oh, we’ll just sell directly.” Yeah, you know, maybe you can sell some things directly. You won’t get the volume you need and you have to take care of the customers. Cars need to be serviced – even electric cars need servicing – and you need dealerships to do that.
When can I buy a Kia EV9?
Kia says it’ll go on sale towards the end of 2023 in the UK and early 2024 in the US, but we’ll have to hang on a little while for pricing and specifications. That said, we expect the EV9 to command a premium price to reflect its size, battery and tech on board – likely from around £65,000.
We’ll update this story when we know more – stay tuned.