Easy to forget, perhaps, that there was a time – not so long ago – that Kia was a name intrinsically associated with no-frills affordable mobility, and not long before that it was a name almost entirely unheard of outside of its home market.
That’s an image that’s been well and truly erased in Europe by a slew of competitively specified and handsomely styled mass-market models like the latest Kia Sorento and Kia EV6, but back in its homeland, Kia is still well represented in the affordable car sphere by the hordes of Ray mini-MPVs that buzz nimbly around the wheels of buses and behemoth SUVs as they navigate the streets of Seoul - one of the world’s most congested cities.
There’s an electric version (Kia’s first EV, don’cha know?) with a just-about-useful 86 miles of range and decent charging stats on offer, but it’s roundly outnumbered on the streets of Korea’s capital by the much more conventional petrol car, which caters – to great effect – to the portion of city drivers who haven’t yet switched to a BMW M5 Competition, Genesis GV80 or Hyundai Grandeur. Seriously, this is a wondrously diverse car parc.
Priced from the equivalent of £8620, it measures 3595mm long by 1595mm wide and 1700mm tall, so it has a similar footprint to the closely related Kia Picanto but is taller than a Range Rover Evoque, which – together with a flat cabin floor and tightly packaged drivetrain – means it is tangibly more capacious inside. We’ll refrain from using the T-word, but a car of this size has no right to feel so roomy and open. Fair enough, the boot is pretty tight, but all four passengers get plenty of head and knee room, and there’s enough adjustability in the driver’s seat and steering wheel to suggest a longer journey wouldn’t be out of bounds. Plus, its boxy stature and upright seating position mean visibility is about as good as it gets, and parking is a cinch.
So too is the Ray’s equipment list more generous than European buyers in this segment may have come to expect: electric windows all round, a touchscreen (albeit a fairly rudimentary one), climate control and about as much ADAS as you’d want - a city motorist could ask for little more. The phone holder in place of smartphone mirroring functionality or a sat-nav is a giveaway to its bargain-basement billing, but hey, it worked for the Volkswagen Up and it works very well for Dacia. Most phones are as big as dashboard screens now, anyway.
What the Ray markedly isn’t is ‘nippy’, ‘fizzy’, ‘grunty’ or any of those other adjectives we tend to reserve for low-powered econoboxes such as this. Not by any stretch of the imagination. The naturally aspirated 1.0-litre four-cylinder petrol unit deployed here is familiar from the entry-level UK-spec Picanto (albeit in a different state of tune), and even that car – smaller and lighter as it is – is among the slowest on sale today. Experienced here, with roughly 70kg of added bulk to shift along and running through a faintly agricultural automatic gearbox, this is an engine clearly at its best in an environment where it will rarely be called on to exceed 30mph.
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