2022 Kia Sorento GT-Line PHEV review

South Korea is rapidly emerging as the keenest of beans when it comes to electrification. Kia and its compatriot Hyundai have been chucking rock after rock at European and Japanese carmakers, trying out hybrid, plug-in hybrid – most recently with the 2022 Kia Sorento large SUV – and all-electric vehicles.

We might have got Kia’s Niro EV late but it has been around for a while, as has Hyundai’s Kona Electric.

Conspicuously absent in almost any car company’s CV you care to name is a plug-in hybrid SUV, particularly larger ones. Sure, you can get a Cayenne or X5 hybrid but you see where I’m going here  – price. Toyota, which is only now showing its hand on EVs still won’t give us the PHEV versions of the Kluger or RAV4.

Kia has broken first to get a big SUV with a plug-in hybrid under the six-figure mark. And it seems like a logical progression for the astonishingly good Kia Sorento, a car that is let down only by its petrol drivetrain, a lazy, thirsty V6.

Pricing and Features

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The Sorento GT-Line PHEV starts you off at $80,330 before on-road costs. That’s a lot of money but luckily, you get it all with the GT-Line in the first place.

But it’s a solid $11,340 more than the very good diesel version of that car and, according to the configurator, roughly $10,580-$13,580 more than the HEV.

The diesel truly was the one to have over the silly petrol V6 front-wheel-drive car. Better engine, better transmission, just better. We'll be driving the HEV soon, but for now, we're mentally comparing the PHEV with the diesel.

In price terms, the diesel Sorento was already pushing it for a Kia, which had been the value proposition in the market. But with this new design heading upmarket, up went the price. It is a quality product, after all.

The Sorento GT-Line PHEV starts you off at $80,330. That’s a lot of money … $11,340 more than the very good diesel version

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For your more than eighty-large, you get 19-inch alloy wheels (instead of the ICE’s 20-inch rims), a twelve-speaker stereo, multi-zone climate control, 360-degree parking cameras, keyless entry and start, front and rear parking sensors, adaptive cruise control, digital instruments, sat-nav, auto LED headlights with auto high beam, heated and cooled front seats, Nappa leather upholstery, power tailgate (and mirrors and windows), auto wipers, heated steering wheel, huge sunroof and a full-size spare.

The excellent 10.25-inch central touchscreen is, as you can tell from the number of inches, a monster. It’s also packed full of goodies, information about the car and a reasonable amount of data about the hybrid system, which is nice. As well as the native sat-nav, it has DAB+ digital radio, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto (both via USB) all wrapped up in an extremely slick, configurable and good-looking interface.

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The 12.3-inch digital dashboard is also excellent and features the very clever LaneWatch style camera system that activates a camera corresponding to whether you’re indicating left or right to show you the view down the side of the car towards to back. It’s a sort of blind-spot camera and safety device for not flattening other road users.

On top of all that is a substantial five-star ANCAP-awarded safety package with six airbags, ABS, stability and traction controls, blind-spot monitoring with avoidance assist, forward collision warning (high and low speed), forward auto emergency braking (high and low speed), rear AEB, rear collision warning, reverse cross-traffic alert, front cross-traffic alert, lane departure warning, lane-keep assist, exit warning and speed sign recognition.

It’s worth noting that the curtain airbags do not reach to the third row.

Comfort and Space

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The space in the Sorento is massive and the GT-Line’s cabin is an absolute belter. While I don’t think the GT-Line’s extra bells and whistles are strictly necessary, half of private buyers choose the top-end car – which explains Kia’s decision to deliver the PHEV in this spec (and the HEV, too).

Front passengers luxuriate (no, really) in big comfortable seats with quilted Nappa leather. They’re very comfortable and have tons of adjustment as well as heating and cooling, the latter a godsend in these, shall we say, atmospherically unsettled times.

All the controls look and feel great. It looks terrific, too, with a strong European feel to the materials. And by that I mean, it feels expensive

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You have a wireless charging pad for your phone, two cup holders and two bottle holders in the doors as well as a heftily-sized bin under the centre console armrest.

All the controls look and feel great, with a heavy emphasis on technology. It looks terrific, too, with a strong European feel to the materials. And by that I mean, it feels expensive. Lower grades have some classic grained plastic but here in the top-end Sorento, it’s restricted to bits you hardly see or touch.

Moving to the rear, accommodation is again excellent. The second-row passengers get a big armrest with cup holders, USB ports, their own climate controls and big wide windows to view the world and a big sunroof to see the sky, too. You could get three across the middle row no trouble, but as ever, the smaller person needs to go in the middle. There's plenty of headroom and legroom for adults in the outboard seats, though.

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The third row is pretty tight – in other markets, Kia would point you to the larger Telluride – but the Sorento is still usable. The batteries don’t seem to have caused any space-snatching grief and again you have storage for bottles and phones and even a fan control for the air vents that come all the way back here. Just no curtain airbags. The windows are tolerably big to see out of and there’s even an intercom function for first-to-third row chatter/remonstration.

With the third row in place, you have 175 litres of cargo space. Put that away and you have an extremely useful 604 litres and with all seats down a massive 1988 litres. That’s a lot of space and just 30 fewer litres than the non-electrified variants.

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We discovered – well, the dog discovered  – a very clever feature. I include the dog because it’s hilarious. After a few years of hating the car, she has changed her tune and loves coming for a ride with her head resting on the window sill for that windswept and interesting look.

As we approached a tunnel, the windows suddenly started closing, causing great consternation in our canine companion. After a bit of digging in the menus, we found that the car knows you’re approaching a tunnel and closes the windows to keep out pollutants. It’s clever but might frighten the dogs.

On the Road

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Obviously, the big news in the PHEV is its plug-in hybrid system. Instead of the big chunky V6 petrol engine or the 2.2-litre turbo-diesel, Kia has fitted the 1.6-litre turbo-petrol familiar from various cars across the Hyundai-Kia group.

It’s not a great engine but in this installation, it mostly makes sense. It’s compact and reasonably powerful and works well with the six-speed automatic transmission that sends power to all four wheels.

The transmission has a 67kW/304Nm electric motor strapped to it, enabling a claimed 57km EV range. That’s fed by a 13.8kWh lithium-ion battery nestled under the cargo bay (the spare is slung underneath the car rather than stored under the boot floor).

The battery itself is never completely flat as the engine will feed it 3.3kW every hour to ensure, at worst, the car behaves like a series hybrid

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M’colleague David Bonnicci tested this car around his standard loop and did quite well on fuel consumption but my self-imposed task was to see what I could do with the EV-only range as I was not expecting any longer trips. Let me apply the usual disclaimers that I have access to a mains power outlet on my driveway so charging is quite simple. And charging from a 240-volt socket is really the best way to power the Kia’s battery.

The setup for charging was really simple; you can punch in off-peak times (in our case 10pm-6am at 13c/kWh) and walk away from the car at the end of the day all plugged in and ready to charge. As we have a solar inverter we could see it draw a stack of power to start things off and then gradually tail away. The battery itself is never completely flat as the engine will feed it 3.3kW every hour to ensure, at worst, the car behaves like series hybrid, keeping fuel consumption down.

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Only problem is, it’s very slow to charge so we needed every minute of that off-peak time to get the battery back to full. It’s not a big drama, but public charging stations won’t make it go any faster no matter how much grunt they’ve got due to the Sorento's lack of DC fast-charging capability.

Given that, we spent about $1.30 in electricity every time we charged it or we could have spent nothing during the day if the sun had ever shone, which it didn’t really.

When Kia punched the numbers into a spreadsheet, combined power and torque comes out at 195kW and 350Nm, which seems weird and is the result of an impenetrably difficult-to-understand formula. Fundamentally, it's about the same output as the very thirsty petrol V6 front-wheel-drive version.

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The EV range in my hands was a solid 47km with a few bursts of 80km/h (no ICE cut-in) and a lot of pottering around town with the climate control working hard to find dry air in a Sydney summer to feed into the cabin. The torque from the electric motor is abundant, even for this two-ton chunker and I very much enjoyed pedalling around town in it.

Given the price of petrol at the moment, spending a buck thirty a day, even three times that, is way cheaper than visiting the pump. Your payback for the hefty PHEV premium is still many, many thousands of kilometres so if you’re going in thinking you’re going to see the money back, I’m here to tell you it’s unlikely.

Moving a big SUV on 4.3L/100km is impressive and with a 50kg weight penalty over the diesel, it feels the same as the ICE-only GT-Line

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But even when the ICE does kick in, which it did in the second half of the week as I wanted to experience the difference, it’s pretty thrifty. Moving a big SUV on just 4.3L/100km is an impressive achievement and with just a 50kg weight penalty over the diesel, it pretty much feels the same as the ICE-only GT-Line.

Normally this is where I’d complain about the fuel figure being more than 30 per cent above the ADR claim, but that figure is laughably low at 1.6L/100km and nobody should take it seriously in PHEVs.

Apart from the engine, it’s a Sorento, which means an excellent balance of ride and handling, easy to live with and just a really nice place to be, even when stuck in traffic.

The electric motor delivers effortless forward movement in even moderately fast traffic and it’s quite rare for the motor to cut in. In HEV mode it will also deliver spectacular economy for such a big unit, while saving both battery and fuel.

Ownership

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Kia offers a hefty seven years/unlimited-kilometre warranty except for the electrification gubbins, which is covered by a seven-year/150,000km warranty. That should suit most Australian owners for length and coverage, but it’s something high-milers will want to know.

Servicing is every 12 months/10,000km, which is really annoying, mostly because the turbo 1.6 demands it. According to the capped-price servicing schedule on Kia’s website, maintaining the Sorento PHEV will cost $4894 across the seven visits or just under $700 per service. Three of the services are less than $400, two are under $800 and two are over a thousand. So it’s not especially cheap to service and given the short intervals, this is another high-miler issue.

VERDICT

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If you can get past the price or are super-keen for zero tailpipe emissions with the strong backup of a turbo-petrol engine, this is definitely the car for you.

While you can have a Kluger hybrid for less (and it will cost less to run), you can also have a Sorento hybrid…

…or can you? My week with the Sorento PHEV had me in a very exclusive club. Before the car even arrived the waiting list was racing to twelve months and it hadn't even appeared on the website until a few weeks after I had the car.

That’s what you’d call an unexpected hit coupled with global mayhem.

Kia continues to deliver with the Sorento PHEV. While the financial argument and technical window for PHEVs is closing rapidly, it’s a fine car that will fit a lot of urban Australians’ driving habits.

Just maybe not their financial spending power…

2022 Kia Sorento GT-Line PHEV specifications