2023 Kia Sportage X-Line Review Your NEXT compact SUV?

Is the 2023 Kia Sportage your next compact SUV? Welcome back to the channel guys. My name is Christopher. This is Cars Unlocked where we film all sorts of car reviews. Today we have the 2023 Kia Sportage X-Line and with an MSRP of $34,195. We're gonna go through all the ins and outs to help you determine if this is the right crossover to buy. So let's start with a quick look at the front end. This one had a full redesign here for 2023 so this is really what Kia has to offer here and this X-Line is one up from the bottom and then you can go up to the EX and then go up to the SX and the limited packages from there, but I do like what they did with the front end here. We have these triangle style headlights and then we have this nice large front grille with our new Kia emblem slapped right above it. I love how it goes all the way across and just lets a lot of air into the vehicle for that flow. For the power plan, it's a 2.5 liter four-cylinder engine attached to an 8-speed automatic transmission. It's going to give you about a hundred and eighty-seven horsepower and a hundred and seventy-eight pounds feet of torque. Quite a bit of power for the small four-cylinder. This X-Line package is sitting on these 19-inch aluminum alloy rims. I love the two-tone here. Gives it kind of that split-spoke gap like look here. Michelin all-season tires and let's look at the side profile. Comes with our rear privacy glass, our blacked-out roof rails, and I love how it contrasts with this exterior blue color with the black and the blue. We do have our blacked-out mirrors with our LED turning accents on the mirrors as well. Rear parking sensors are on the back. That's going to assist you when parking. We do have our Sportage badging. Huge Kia emblem. It is very kind of plain back here, which I like. It does give it that kind of minimalist look. We have our brake lights above our windshield there as well. Now, let's jump on the inside. 9.5 liters for every hundred kilometers combined between the city and the highway or 24 MPG. So, obviously, you're never going to get what it's rated, but you can hear that once I put my foot on the gas the engine started up again because we are idling. It does come with this auto start-stop feature. So it will shut the car off when you're idling to conserve fuel and right now we're driving it in the smart remote. There's a few different drive modes here. For the terrain modes, there's a snow mode, a mud mode, a sand mode, and then there's a normal and a sport mode, which you can see right on my screen there. And you can shift between the two of them and find which one you like. And I kind of like how the colors adjust a little bit just to give a little different feel for the drive modes. You can see here once I drop it into sport mode, I get the red lighting and then back to the purple. Check it out the interior here. This one comes with this X-line leather seating. It's an eight-way power adjustable driver's seat on the inside and you do get the push-button start. So let's jump in and start it up. So these front seats are heated and we have a heated steering wheel, perfect on a day like today. And this is kind of what's going on here guys, manual temperature gauges. There is a quite a few high-end features and then there's also some kind of regular features here. So you get things like wireless charger and the heated seats and heated wheel, but you don't have digital temperature control. I like the layout that Kia's done here. They've really gone with these dual screens on almost all their vehicles here. 8-inch screen for your infotainment. It does connect to like Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, and then you have this screen here behind you for things like your digital speedometer. And you have your drive info on this kind of smaller screen as well. Let's just do a little quick acceleration. So a little loud on the takeoff, but it did pick up here. That was to 60 kilometers per hour pretty quickly. It's definitely like the feel of the traditional 8-speed automatic versus a CVT. You can really kind of just punch it in this respect. On the wheel, we have our lane-keeping assistant and our cruise control as well. It does come with safety features like forward collision avoidance and forward collision assist. We have a blind spot monitor on our mirrors, lane departure warning as well. If you have kids, I'm sure you're wondering how it's like in the back. So let's go back there and check it out. Jumping in the back, I do like the leather seats and you know, there's a ton of space back here. That's one thing you like about this Sportage. We have the center armrest with two cupholders. There is ventilation back here so the heat is going to flow quickly to the back. Nice deep mat pockets. Could use a couple more cupholders. There's a tiny little cupholder in the door here. No USB inputs like we see on the other vehicles. So when I put it in reverse, the backup camera comes on automatically here and you can see we get the guidance lines. And then there's two angles that you can show here. This is like your top-down angle. If you're backing up to something or a tow hitch, you can see your distance here. So pretty good visibility out of the backup camera. So there's a manual trunk on this X-line here and here you can see it comes with a carpeted max, but a massive trunk. That's one thing we noticed right away. Very deep and then you do have the levers here to fold the seats down, which makes things nice. Not quite a flat storage surface, but you do have a ton of space if like you're doing the Home Depot thing. Or you got to put a couple dead bodies in here. Like you could probably stack up maybe a dozen dead bodies in the back depending on the size. Overall, like is this a compact SUV to be shopping for? I do feel the price is right. Kia comes with some of the best warranties on the market. So, there's definitely some value there. It is a nice smooth drive for fuel economy. I would probably consider maybe one of the higher models up than this X-line. I do like a few more features, but it does come with a lot of necessities. I'll give you that like backup camera, Bluetooth for your phone, obviously all the power options. The Qi charger is nice for charging your phone. It will charge your phone down below and then there's some USBs as well. If you want to charge manually or you can connect to the Android Auto and the Apple CarPlay. Now if you're going to have if you're having trouble connecting to the Android Auto or the Apple CarPlay, we have videos of those on our channel. So make sure you check those out, but I'll link those as well if you're having trouble connecting. But guys, I want to hear from you. Comment what you guys think about the Kia Sportage. Yes, I say Sportage. I'm a Canadian. Do you say Sportage? Comment how you guys say it. As always, if you're new here, subscribe to our channel. We do all different types of reviews and automotive content. We'll see you in the next video.