The Dog-Friendly Kia EV5 Starts At £39,295

While it's not necessarily the sort of car we get overly worked up about at CT, the Kia EV5 is a massively important car for its maker, finally giving it an electric sibling to the enormously successful Sportage. It's been available in the Asia-Pacific market for a little while now, but it's headed to the UK later this year, with pricing kicking off at £39,925.

That gets you the basic Air trim, while £42,595 will net you the mid-range GT-Line, bringing beefier 19-inch wheels, vehicle-to-load capability, electric seats and wireless phone charging among its extra goodies. The range is topped by the £47,095 GT-Line S, with more extra kit including a sunroof, a 360-degree surround-view monitor and a bangin' Harman Kardon sound system. 

Size-wise, the EV5 is a tiny bit larger than the Sportage in all dimensions. In other words, it’s a mid-size crossover, a type of car that continues to sell like high-temperature baked goods for reasons that still slightly puzzle us as enthusiasts.

It’s based on Kia and Hyundai’s excellent E-GMP underpinnings, designed specifically for EVs, and all versions use an 81.4kWh battery pack. That’s good for an estimated max range of 329 miles. Using a 400V architecture, though, rather than a newer, shinier 800V system, does see it lose out a little to some rivals in the charging speed stakes – 10 to 80 per cent will take an estimated 29 minutes on a rapid charger.

There’ll be just the one motor configuration available to begin with, a single-motor, front-drive setup producing 214bhp and 218lb ft of torque. This, says Kia, allows it to hit 62mph in 8.4 seconds and a 102mph top speed.

Elsewhere, it’s got everything we’ve come to expect from the modern family EV – one-pedal driving, vehicle-to-load capability and the latest suite of driver assist systems that you’ll probably turn off as soon as you get in (Kia, thankfully, makes this quite easy).

Inside, the Chinese-built Asian-market EV5 gets a strange bench seat arrangement in the front, but that’s been switched out in the European version for an enormous sliding centre console arrangement, offering many places for stashing things.

Another new feature is Pet Mode – borrowing a Tesla party trick, this keeps the interior at a pet-friendly temperature while you’re away, locks the buttons to stop Fido from accidentally disengaging the handbrake, and displays a message on the infotainment so nobody’s tempted to put your window through in a rescue attempt. Otherwise, though, it’s very familiar from other Kia EVs, with the dual 12.3-inch screen setup front and centre.

With just a single battery and motor configuration, and two trims to choose from – the base model and posher GT-Line – the EV5 will arrive in Europe with a fairly streamlined range, although we wouldn’t be surprised to see punchier dual-motor versions join further down the line. UK deliveries will kick off by the end of this year.