Kia EV6 GT (2022 - ) Electric review

As with all electric cars the EV6 GT’s running costs are very low compared with equivalently powerful petrol and diesel models. Most Government grants and incentives have disappeared but the low Benefit In Kind tax rate remains for the time being, so if you’re a business user, electric makes a lot of sense. If you can charge at home it’s also still far cheaper to run your car on electricity than petrol or diesel, no matter what domestic energy supplier you use. The only time the gap closes is if you need to top up at one of the rapid chargers you now typically find at motorway services, where you’ll pay a lot per kilowatt hour (kWh). Thankfully, servicing costs for EVs tend to be cheaper than those for equivalent petrol or diesels, and Kia has a strong reliability record, anyway. If you want to keep costs ultra low, use Eco or Normal modes, not Sport or GT.

Kia has an excellent reliability record and offers a seven-year/100,000-mile warranty to prove how confident it is in its products. Rightly so, given very few customers report serious or niggling faults. The standard EV6 is only a year or so old at the time of this test, so it’s too early for recurring faults to be known. But we don’t expect many. Kia’s sister company Hyundai uses the same technology and also has an excellent reliability record.

The EV6 GT comes with variable all-wheel drive, active suspension and large wheels with huge brakes, all of which add up to a car ready to get you out of trouble should you overstep the mark. Added to that, Kia offers pretty much every driver assistance programme available on this flagship car, including lane-change warning, blind-spot warning, a vibration to alert you if you’re apparently running off the road, emergency braking, an alarm for if you’re backing out onto a road and haven’t spotted traffic crossing behind you, and other safety stuff that’s meant to prevent you hitting anything or anyone from the front or rear, pulling out into the path of others or straying out of your lane. We tested the car on a drag strip, skid pan and twisting test track and it beeped, pinged, and fought for (and maintained) grip all the way round in all drive modes, even the lairy GT one.

Kia has added sound-deadening foam inside the tyres for the EV6 GT and it was lovely and quiet on our test drive in Sweden, even over some pretty rubbish road surfaces. You also get suede-trimmed bucket seats and splashes of lime green everywhere. The storage options in this large car are brilliant. You get three massive areas to store large items between the two front seats, plus a wireless charging phone tray. It feels airy and spacious in the front and rear. The boot has a false floor you can remove to reveal an extra few inches of depth - we say jettison the false floor when you get it as you’ll want to make full use of the space, which is average for the class.

We’re not huge fans of the fussy digital layout Kia uses on its dashboard, which has none of the minimalism and contemporary design of, say, Mercedes, Polestar or Peugeot. There are small graphics everywhere telling you the state of battery, speed, regenerative braking level and more. But the screen is large, and the sat-nav works fine, although it is also behind the times compared with European rivals. The major difference for the driver is the lime-green GT button on the steering wheel, which adds a crazy mode to Eco, Normal and Sport. It complements the rear spoiler, lime-green piping on the seats and GT badging, although whether anyone buying an electric family car wants a go-faster bodykit is debatable. You get wireless smartphone charging, a 360-degree parking camera, and a head-up display showing your speed and directions when the sat-nav is active.

More power is the reason for this car, the motors driving both front and rear wheels developing a staggering 585 horsepower between them. That means 0-62mph in just 3.5 seconds. More fun means less range, the EV6 GT capable of 263 miles versus the 328 miles of the base version of the standard EV6. Flappy paddles on the steering wheel control the strength of the regenerative braking, right down to doing away with the need for using the brake pedal at all. We tested it in Eco, Normal, Sport and GT mode on a track in a drag race and on a twisting test route. Like all electric cars it’s lightning quick off the line, but in GT mode it squirms around for traction before booting itself down the road at a seriously cracking pace. Of course, no owner will do this, partly because you’d never have the space on the public road, and partly because the range disappears before your eyes. But it's fun, albeit with a more mature GT vibe more than an adrenaline-pumping sports car one. Kia claims you can charge the EV6 GT from 10 per cent to 80 per cent in just 18 minutes. It fails to mention that this will be at an ultra-rapid charging point, which no one has at their home and of which there are only a handful of in the UK. Still, when we all have super-fast home chargers the EV6 GT will be in its element.