Kia Sportage SUV 1.6T GDi PHEV GT-Line S 5dr Auto AWD Owner Review

The 7 year guarantee is excellent but, I doubt you’ll live that long driving this KIA or, after my further investigation, any other new KIA with these common driver aids installed. I suspect this car will cause a serious accident in the future. I've read the owners manual from cover to cover and can't find where to permanently disable some of KIA'S “Driver Assist Systems” that seem to cause too many dangerous, real-life issues. I've taken the car to my dealership in Oxford where I learned some of the sytems can’t be permanently disabled. The result is the Sportage is a terrible car to drive, both on urban roads and the motorway. The automatic gearbox is nicely geared (although it doesnt like doing a steady 30mph in town) whereby the engine is slightly underpowered. The electronic dashboard is ‘sluggish’ to opererate, you can easily make the wrong button-press selections especially after you’ve become familiar with the menu systems. This includes the Sat Nav selections and even the music/entertainment system. The Sat/Nav is excellent once you’re used to it, the Music System is limited and frustrating to use, especially when driving. Overall the whole Music/Sat-Nav/Car system takes too long to keep-up with your keystrokes which is frustrating, again, particularly when youre driving. I recommend you carefully test-drive this car for a weekend at least, don’t just drive it around for an hour like I did. I now feel stupid and coned for not testing it more thoroughly. I'm now really concerned, the secondhand value and desirability of this car is going to be very poor when you want to sell or trade it in. It’s already got a bad reputation. I’m so disappointed in myself for falling for the hype and so disappointed with KIA themselves. How they got to release such a car with dangerous “automatic” systems on the UK market i dont know!