Stroll as much as the EV9 for the primary time and what moves you first is the recent and rapid enchantment of its new styling, an edgy remedy with an arrestingly trendy simple entrance panel, technical-looking headlights, cladding alongside the frame aspects and an excessively simple tailgate design. It’s lengthy and boxy, nevertheless it’s additionally a automobile like no different, by some means now not surprising sufficient to discourage new arrivals.

Like its smaller, two-year-old sibling, the Kia EV6, the EV9 sits at the Hyundai Crew’s EV-specific World Modular Platform (E-GMP), and it stocks a lot {hardware}, together with its all-independent multi-link suspension and lots of powertrain elements. The EV9 gives patrons a collection of rear- and four-wheel-drive variations.

Access-level fashions have a 200bhp motor that sends 258lb toes of torque completely to the rear axle, yielding 0-62mph acceleration of 9.4sec. The 4×4 has a couple of motors of equivalent energy (189bhp every) fixed entrance and rear, this means that the automobile has a complete 378bhp and on faucet and will flip a 0-62mph time of 6.0sec. Torque is an excellent 442lb toes, however this may also be boosted to 515lb toes with an extra-cost, over-the-air device replace that shaves some other 0.7sec from the 0-60mph time.

Such is the smoothness and clean reaction of the EV9’s controls that you simply quickly put out of your mind it’s an EV. As a substitute, it’s an easy-driving automobile with an excessively quiet motor and a spread as regards to 300 miles, relying the way you pressure. Movement is managed from a small switchblock at the proper aspect of the guidance column and there are the standard ancillary switches (together with a blessed one-touch operation to disable the lane-keeping help) at the guidance wheel. Like in different Hyundai and Kia EVs, the depth of the regenerative braking may also be numerous by way of guidance wheel paddles. (Please, competitors, do that yourselves!)

Our check automobile is a mid-range homemarket model, missing one of the crucial decor of a high-spec UK EV9 and with out the second one motor. The braking is strong and clean to modulate, the guidance feels most conventional in, aptly, Customary using mode (the others are Game and Eco) and the controls all have that frictionless panache of manufacturers within the BMW and Porsche realm. Such issues display you ways relentless is Kia’s march to greatness.