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HomeTop NewsKia EV6 GT first drive: Smaller Ranger, more speed

Kia EV6 GT first drive: Smaller Ranger, more speed

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The EV6 GT is still a heavy car, and its 2,185-kilogram curb weight is felt through corners when driven fast. If really left to chance, we suspect that physics will soon overtake the efforts of Kia’s engineers. Obviously, despite its massive power, this is not a car designed for track use. While testing the GT on the Nürburgring Nordschleife, Kia said as much, admitting that it was “built very specifically for road use.”

Likewise, you don’t need to know that a “secret” drift mode shuts down the front motors, takes a few minutes off the traction control, and lets you slide the Kia with the accelerator. Fun for a few minutes on private land, but meaningless the other 99.9 percent of the time.

Photographer: Kia

Inside, the GT shares a very similar cabin with a standard EV6 equipped with the GT-Line option pack. It’s as comfortable and quiet at low speeds as any other EV. However, the wind noise generated by the wing mirrors (a hangover problem from the standard EV6) is louder than we’d like from a car costing more than £60,000.

The cabin is attractive, with GT-exclusive semibucket seats offering extra support, but the softer, squishier chairs fitted to the standard car aren’t as comfortable.

The twin 12.2-inch curved dashboard displays are similar to the standard EV6, and have touch-sensitive controls below them, showing icons for media and climate, but not at the same time. Kia has tried to keep the clutter down here, but it does so with a system that makes the climate control look disappointing unless you advance to a touch-sensitive button to switch from media and navigation to temperature. Instead of giving up the heating and cooling controls, it switches back to the previous after a few seconds.

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The Kier wireless phone charger is more reliable and more reliable than anything else we’ve seen, but the absence of wireless Apple CarPlay, the glaring omission of the current vanilla EV6, remains unfortunate. Practicality is on a par with its siblings, with the same cabin and storage space as the standard dual-motor variant, namely 20 liters of storage.

Kia says it’s starting to build a grand tourer reminiscent of the comfortable, big-engine cars of the 1970s. The EV6 GT certainly has plenty of performance, and the suspension and differential changes show the company has put real effort into driving dynamics and straight-line speed. But the 262-mile range GT fails to live up to its billing.

While the superfast charge via the car’s 800-volt technology goes some way to mitigating range issues, we wish Kia had stuck with full performance and opted for a longer mix of speed and range instead.

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