AT NIGHT: 2025 KIA Carnival SX Prestige -- Night Review and Night Drive

When you walk up to the vehicle with the key, it has a full proximity system. It'll sense the key and of course let you access the vehicle, but it also turns on this light right here on the handle. There's no other approach lights or anything else that turns on just by simply walking up to the vehicle. Now it does have more lights when you hit the unlock button. There's actually a little light on the key fob as well that illuminates when you hit the buttons. When you unlock the vehicle, it will flash the lights here. Turn on the interior lights and exterior lights. It's a good safety feature. The headlight switch is not illuminated and the interior lights don't really shine on it, but when you turn the switch, it shows up here on the screen showing you what you're doing. So let's go ahead and turn off the exterior lights. So I have it in the off position completely, but we still have exterior lights on. It still has these very bright amber lights here in the front. There's no taillights though. If we want that light to turn off, we can engage the parking brake and it will turn off the exterior lights. Now I have the parking lights on and basically this amber light is now illuminated here in the front. It has some pretty cool styling. It has that vertical and horizontal lines that's visible from the sides, the front, all around and fairly bright. Not overly bright, but you can see it. Other cars can see you and that's the point of parking lights. There's a little side marker right here, but it doesn't really need it because this extends here on the side and is visible from the side as well. Basically the same deal with the taillights. You can see them from the side which serves as a side marker and they kind of extend vertically and horizontally. It's red in color and really impressive taillights almost completely across the entire vehicle. There's a little gap there in the center, but yeah, look real nice. Also the tag light is also on now. It illuminates the ground a little bit as well. Turn signal here in the front is basically just that that light that we saw before, amber. It's the same color, it's just much much brighter. So very well done turn signal. It's visible from all directions here in the front and very bright so everybody can see it and so yeah, looks really cool too. It's kind of like an accent light as well. There's also a turn signal indicator here on the side mirror. It's amber in color, visible from the front, the side and the back. It's fairly bright especially on the side and back. And the turn signal back here is not amber, it's red. So it's in that little section right here. Let's put the brightness down a little bit. You can see it has a little style to it. It's fairly bright so yeah, it's blowing out the camera a little bit. But yeah, let's see what they look like here. Taillights and everything with the brightness turned down. Now there's also a brake light at the top of the glass in the spoiler and the reverse lights are in the bottom of the vehicle on the bumper. So let's go ahead and turn the headlights on and I'm going to toggle the fog lights on and off so you can see the difference there. It's mostly close to the vehicle but they do add quite a bit here in the front. So the headlights are a vertical stack of projectors. So there's four projectors. The upper two, all of them are on now but the upper two are your low beams. So those are the primary lights that are shining right now. The other ones are illuminated but they're not very bright. They're just kind of filling in that light. Now the fog lights here at the bottom are reflector LEDs and there's two of them. Pretty bright of legacy in there. But yeah, looking pretty good. That's a pretty cool style having those dual fog lights and then the quad stacked projectors in addition to the amber lights. That's a really cool look. Now we're going to go on the road and see how well they perform but yeah, they look good from this view. Now back here, I'm going to step back a little ways. So I'm six feet tall. I can look directly at the headlights without getting blinded but when I dip the camera down you can see the cutoff is down here. So most of the light is about three feet off the ground. Two and a half, three feet off the ground. So it keeps that light below the eyes of oncoming cars. That's the intention anyway. So now let's go to high beams and the fog lights turn off with the high beams which is typical. And now all these lights basically have the same intensity. All four of them. So before it was just the top two. Now the other two basically have that same intensity. All these projectors are now illuminated and they're all bright. Basically about the same brightness. But yeah, basically it looks almost the same from this angle. But when we go down the road you'll see the difference there. The cargo area, a little bit disappointing here. It has a single light right here and you can see it's like shining on the seat more than it is in the cargo area. Now we have these little cubby areas that are completely dark here and here. And then we have shadows around. It really is a fairly poor lighting situation here in the cargo area. Now it does have a backlit button for the lowering power liftgate but the other button is not illuminated for some reason. So there's no approach light, no puddle lights or anything like that here on the back door. The second row seats have most, the lights are coming from there in the center and it's mostly there in the lap area in the floorboard. But yeah, I mean, it's okay. Not all that great I guess but it's okay. Especially where, you know, it's shining where you need it most. So that's fine. This area is fairly well illuminated but there's a pocket down here that's not illuminated. So yeah. There's also these USB ports here not illuminated. These buttons are not illuminated. The buttons for closing the sliding door here are illuminated. I mean, you see that. The third row does have two lights and it's more evenly lit actually in the third row than the second row. Then the USB ports are backlit here. But yeah, these fairly decent lights back there in the third row. The inside of the driver's door, no puddle light or anything like that. And all the pockets are completely dark here. Here you have some backlit buttons, dark floorboards, and the interior lights here are coming from the center. Basically just the little tap map, just like little lights, map lights or reading lights. That's it. That's basically the interior lights here in the front. Okay, so I have the interior lights on. I have the door open so you can see what it looks like sitting in the seat. And yeah, it's not too bad. Having the light here in the lap is good because part of it is you don't want the light to shine in the driver's face. So that's good. It looks a little bright on camera, but it's actually not shining in my face. It's shining right here. So whatever I need to read or something like that, I can hold it right here and I can see it well. But yeah, as far as there's some areas in which is dark and that's just the way this vehicle is. Let's go ahead and shut the door and see what we're left with here. So before I continue here in the front, I just want to show you it does have the climate control backlit here for the second row passengers in the top. Okay, so we have some issues. Now we do have some backlit buttons on the steering wheel. The screens look good here. The gauge cluster, this screen right here, the camera system is fantastic day and night. It's actually too bright for the camera right now, but yeah. But yeah, very, very, very well done the camera system. Both that and also the blind spot the cameras here as well work really well. Both sides, even at night time. I haven't had any problem with these, the cameras at all really. That's one of the best things about the vehicle's camera system. It's able to help you drive through parking lots and stuff like that and have certainty of where you're parking and around your other vehicles, shopping carts, anything like that. Okay, so we have dark floorboards, but we have backlit buttons and we have dark pockets. So here you probably can't even see anything. There's a whole area where I have my cell phone. There's a little spot to put stuff. Completely dark. Cup holders are dark. There's a pocket here that's dark. The center console is completely dark. You can't see anything. Like right now, I'm trying to show you, you really can't see anything on camera. It's just like an abyss in here. All right, so let's go ahead and turn the camera before I do that. Let's check the glove compartment. Okay, okay, there's a there's a light in the glove compartment. Finally. Okay, so let's just turn the camera brightness like way up there. Like way up there. All right, and even then it's like hard to see in these compartments. So let's try turning on the interior lights again and see if that actually helps. Yeah, okay, so now we can see a little bit in here. Still a little dark, but we can still at least see in here where my cell phone is and a little storage area, the cup holders, this area here, and this is illuminated. So yeah, the interior lights, you have to have those on in order to see anything here. And it's not really doing very much on the floorboard, so don't drop anything on the floor at night unless you have a flashlight or something. So yeah, a lot of a lot of nothing really to show in this particular vehicle as far as the the interior lights here. It's just, you know, there's no ambient lights, nothing like that. Okay, so the rear view mirror is also a rear view camera and it works well day and night. Really good actually. You have the backlit buttons for the home link, garage door, barter controls, you can adjust the brightness and everything on the rear view camera. These are all backlit, these buttons here, including the button to turn on the interior lights, which I'm glad to see. Some vehicles miss that. Now the center roof, there's actually two center roof controls here. I don't know if you can see that. Two sunroof controls, completely dark, can't even see them. You can feel, I guess, you can feel them there, but it'd be nice if they were backlit. I mean, we have electricity up here going on. The rear view or the mirror here has no light unless you physically separately turn it on and it kind of blinds you. It's a little bit just not very well done. So there's the headlight pattern on the fence. There's the high beams, there's the low beams. You can see the clear cutoff here. There's a little shadow on the oncoming lane. It's intended to line up on the oncoming lane anyway. We'll see how this one performs. Okay, so yeah, it does look like there's a deer on the side of the road. Luckily it didn't run out. But yeah, that shadow is lining up fine with the oncoming lane. So it seems like the headlights are fairly well adjusted so far. Now something I want to mention, I do have the camera brightness turned up a little bit higher than what you would actually see. So it's just slightly higher to make sure that you can see the pattern and everything. But yeah, it's so it may look a little bit brighter than what it actually is. So, you know, I'll describe how well they work though as far as my visibility. So hopefully there's not too many cars down this road here. All right, so there's the low beams. And yeah, they're working well. And the distance kind of fades out quickly. And that shadow on the oncoming lane is fine. Not too much brightness there on the sides though. Yeah. Okay, so I had the fog lights on. So yeah, the fog lights are on, there's off. So yeah, fog lights help. But still a little dark on the sides. Just the overall brightness could be better. Let's turn on the high beams. Yeah, the distance is great on the high beams. I can see the trees in distance. This helps out with the sides of the road. And since we have four projectors, they seem to overlap fine. There's no patchiness or anything. And yeah, the brightness since we got those four projectors, they're all adding up all the extra brightness now. So yeah, that helps out a lot. The high beams are really good. I think I like the high beams a little bit better. And yeah, looking at the trees in distance, looking down the road a good way is, you know, does it fade out as bad as the low beams? And the automatic high beams just seems to be working fine right now. Yeah. Yeah, I do like the high beams better than the low beams. And that's basically what you need. You know, when it's dark, you need the lights. The low beams are when there's other cars around. So it's mostly focusing closer to where you're at, or if you're in a city or something like that, where there's already lots of light. But on a dark road like this, the high beams are where you want to have the best, you know, performance basically. And I'm saying, I'm not like super impressed with these headlights, but they're definitely adequate and they're definitely good. You know, they're on the good scale. So yeah, they look good as far as looking at the vehicle and they also have good visibility. So yeah, I think these are good.