2023 Kia Niro EV | Millennial Punishment

The 2023 Kia EV Niro. This is the electrified version of the Niro. This is a small, somewhat subcompact hatchback CUV thing. The important things are, if you are looking at this as an actual family vehicle, you'll be happy to know according to the JD power surveys, this has best in class cargo capacity, second row capacity, and general interior volume. To be entirely honest, despite the nauseating marketing for this car, which pushes every gimmick you can possibly imagine, it's a very usable cabin. Despite being an independent rear suspension, non-premium car, you have a good sized trunk area, you have good headroom, and there's lots and lots of glass. The one thing I will say about the interior space, in Mark's words, this is a cathedral of piano black, whether it be your entire center console, bits on the dash, everything is piano black, which means everything is easily scratchable and dirtyable. Mark drove this car before me and all of his biohazard is everywhere. The last thing I'm gonna bring up is the HVAC and infotainment controls and the infotainment screen. It has a class-leading 10.5 or 10.25 inch display. It'll blow you away with its color and accuracy, not really. It's easy to use, it's what you've seen in everything at this point that's a Kia product. All the controls are corporate Kia controls, which means they are an easy to use mix of touch and physical controls. Past that though, I think Sempra's ahead in the shot and put this thing up in the lift. Mark, we're underneath the Kia EV Niro. This is the electrified variant of the Niro. There's a hybrid and traditional internal combustion version as well. This has slightly over 200 mile range, it's front-wheel drive only, and most importantly, it's not that expensive. It starts in the high 30s, tops out in the mid 40s, and with a tax rebate, you're back in the mid 30s, which makes this a surprisingly affordable EV product. Walk me through this platform and some of the technology. The pros and cons are this, because it has to be a scalable architecture, meaning hybrid, internal combustion, and a pure EV. You have to have all the paneling, you also have to have enough space to potentially do all-wheel drive on the internal combustion part, and to put a battery pack here. On the EV part, since that's what we're looking at, you're stuck with a single motor, front-wheel drive setup at 150 kilowatts, and the battery pack maxes out at 64.7 kilowatt hours at a 400 volt architecture, so that means DC fast charging is 10 to 80 percent in 40 minutes. So there's that. The reason they can't fit a bigger battery pack is the size and the architecture of this car. It's not a pure EV. This battery pack is made by Webasto in Korea, a German company, and everything else is basic Kia stuff here. Almost everything else is steel, steel subframes, all of that. One thing, or there's two things I will bring up suspension-wise. The benefit of going EV is it's a more rigid body. The minus of that is because this chassis, I don't think, was tuned around having all that extra rigidity. It has some weird handling characteristics. In typical Kia, Hyundai fashion, it has a lot of torque, and because it doesn't have a diff and it's not a performance product, you can't put any of that down. You do one-wheel burnouts everywhere. So what they do to fix that is have a completely invasive prison-style stability control. So that power, as much as it's an electric vehicle, it doesn't have all that torque and power that just rips you off the line. It has to slowly engage all of it, and anytime you turn and gas, that stability control is always coming in, and we're going to find that out in the drive. Last thing, range. They claim over a 200-mile range, but this pulled out in our cold Midwestern weather. It was like 30 degrees today. It went from slightly over 200 to immediately in the high 180s. And this does have the option of a battery heater and a heat pump if you're in a cold-weather state. So they do allow that flexibility. So if you're in California, you don't need that, clearly, or a hot-weather state, or Arizona. But here, you would need to option that, and it does, of course, increase the cross and complexity. So, Mark, let's go take a quick drive in this bad boy. All right. All right, Jaden, you and I are both Zoomers. The year is 2030. Our parents don't trust us, so they got us an EV with less than 200-mile range in the cold. Everything's off. We're in sport mode. Come on, Brayden. Don't spill my chug. Oh, man. Look, this future that I'm experiencing right now in my wind edition EV Niro is just tantalizing. So I told Gage that we were getting this, and he said, does it have vegan leather interior? And I said, it's available. He said, well, how is the all-weather or cold-weather performance? I said, it has an available heat pump. He said, well, is there range degradation? I said, well, there's an available battery heater, too. So everything's available. Incredible. My millennial parents saw that we had conjoined 10.25-inch displays, and they were blown away, because millennials are much like animals, impressed by shiny lights. I wish there were more screens in here, frankly. I was driving this to the cafe the other day, and one of the girls that worked there, who I was not interested in, she was not wearing the right product for me. But she's like, how many screens do you have? I said, well, we have a conjoined screen. And she's like, what's the inches? And once I told her, the conversation went downhill. Look, honestly, I'm triggered that this has a steering wheel. I wanted this to have swipe-to-steer, particularly when I do one-wheel burnouts, leaving places. Man, you could have been yoked right now, but no, you have to have something round. What kind of trash did you put me in, Brayden? Well, Jaden, I'm sorry that this highly affordable Kia product doesn't tickle your fancy. From a dynamics perspective, the one thing I will say- Oh, you're actually going to be serious now? No, no. I'm a zoomer. I can only talk about things for about 30 seconds. Okay. So in 30 seconds, what I will tell you about the handling is the engineers who designed this, I don't think designed this chassis with so much rigidity in mind, because the dampers don't seem to match the body rigidity of this vehicle. So as you go over big bumps, it jostles me around. My man bun gets shifted on my head unwontingly. Have you tried beard oil on it? I have not. I don't have anything else to say. I mean, it's a updated Kia Niro. It's kind of like their last generation eco car. This wasn't designed from the ground up to be an EV. No. It was designed to be flexible in terms of having internal combustion option, hybrid option, and a plug-in option, and an EV option. And the EV option, in a moment of seriousness, the marketing for this car is nauseating. It's the worst. I mean, it appeals to a demographic of human being that doesn't actually exist on this planet. But you can get this car. To be fair, you can go to a dealership and they are at MSRP or below. They're not moving particularly fast compared to some of the other products. Why would that be, Mark? Because buyers, you know, they're not always the most savvy. I mean, honestly, if you're just looking at this as a straight-up NPC and you wanted like a low-range EV, there's nothing wrong with it. To the untrained eye, the tech works good. The interior electronics work good. It has a decent audio system. It rides average. It drives pretty quiet. It does mostly everything that you need. I think this rides worse than the regular Miros. I'm not saying that it's great, but I mean, it does everything adequately. There's nothing that it does that's horrible other than the range. Yeah, I guess that's a fair point. And it's cheap. And you could make the argument that the Ranger is good enough for most people, because that's the most argument we see. Most people only drive five miles a day, so we only need a, you know, a five kilowatt-hour battery. And if you drive responsibly, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, it's a current, like, last generation car. If you want this for the price, you could probably get it for, what, $40? Yeah, I mean, you probably, depending on your state and your income level, get a tax rebate. But again, I pulled this out of our shop and immediately, in our Midwestern weather, which, to be fair, apparently, you shouldn't buy EVs in the Midwest, it went from 200, and it just sitting for literally half an hour, went from 200 to 184. So, let's just say you pulled this out of the garage anywhere in California, where everybody buys EVs, you would have pulled it out of the garage at 200, and you would have ended with 600 miles, because you add range in better climates, I hear. I hear that, too. But, Jayden, I also hear that you didn't complete math class. Oh, well, we don't need colleges. You know, that doesn't really get us anything anymore. There's so many people in debt. I went to college, I dropped out, and now I work at a coffee shop, because I get free chai. I save a lot of money that way, technically. You're quite the businessman, Jayden. Let's head into the final thoughts. Final thoughts on the Kia Niro EV. Yes, there was a lot of joking around in this video. It's hard to take this seriously, as most transitional products are very, very here and now. This is no different. It's on an architecture that is easily surpassed by its new pure EVs, like the Ioniq and the EV6. So, who is this for? Well, it's probably for somebody that just needs a very small CUV SUV thing, and you're in a good climate where you don't have to worry about getting a heat pump and a battery warmer, and you don't need a lot of range. That's really it. From a body, interior looks, it's typical Hyundai and Kia stuff. It actually is really good. Where they get their money to do these small cars the way that they do, I don't know. They do a great job. The interior space, aside from the piano black nonsense, is really well laid out. It's super unique. The exterior looks pretty unique, and I think if you're in that market for a car that you don't just want like this box that's just very boring, like CR-V, RAV4, this does tend to offer you something. I just can't really get behind the EV part of this thing. I think you're way better off with an internal combustion car or a hybrid version of this in the modern age of where we're at in 2023. I'm just going to leave it at that. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next video.