Things have quietened down temporarily and the Sportage has been on ‘normal duties’ for the last month with a mixture of fairly routine local and long runs plus some tyre lugging for the rally car preparation. For your info, the Sportage will swallow eight wheels rims and 12 tarmac rally tyres all in one go with nay bother.
I’m still hooked on how relaxing it is to drive, though its fun too with responsive steering and a crisp turn-in. I’ve developed a phobia for car washes having spent eight hours or so polishing whirls out of one of my own cars a few months ago but this one is easy to swab off with a sponge and it’s not equipped with my pet hate, fiddly alloy wheels that are impossible to clean.
There are a couple of criticisms. Although I generally like the layout of the dash, I can’t really see the point of having a second smaller display above the audio system. A bigger one is that they otherwise decent quality is let down by the soft cladding on the dash which is gappy and poorly fitting. But still my biggest bugbear (and not unique to Kia), are the red on black displays which may look great on a designers screen but are at best, murky and indistinct.
With headlights on in any kind of daylight, they dim, whereupon the messages they give vanish from sight altogether. There’s no way I’ve found of turning that feature off, the only solution is to turn the lights off. Note to car designers, not everyone has 20/20 vision and can see flea at 10 paces in the pitch black. Make sure things are visible before you make them pretty.
Other than that the message is all good. I’m working on bringing down the fuel consumption of around the 35mpg mark a(including the towing antics) against a combined figure of 49.6mpg and I’ll let you know how I get on. Later this month It’ll be towing the rally car down to Kent for the first event, no doubt proving yet again that an SUV can double as stylish family car and a serious workhorse with no problem.
By Jesse Crosse
Manufacturers are forever coming up with new niches to ring the changes and what were once just 4x4s have become Sports Utility Vehicle, Sports Activity Vehicles, and now Crossovers. I reckon the Kia Sportage has slipped neatly in to every one of those pigeon holes over the last month because as well as providing the daily transport, it’s fetched my ‘new’ rally car, been a rally support vehicle and done some stirling charity work too.
The first part of the month was pretty exciting as having finally tracked down a Group 4 Ford Escort tarmac rally car that ticked all the boxes (after a five-month search), it was off to its home on the Isle of Wight to retrieve it. With the rented and sizeable trailer in tow we made a whopping 12m vehicle in the eyes of the Ferry company which attracted an appropriate ticket price.
Up with the first fart of a sparrow, junior Jesse Alex and I took off down the M40 and A34, glad of the light work the Sportage made of towing and the comfortable cabin. There was plenty of room for snacks and hot drinks in the cupholders too. The centre console has two sizes of cupholder, one big enough for those thermos cup things which is the sort of detail you notice at that time of the morning.
It was the weekend of those howling gales that we made the trip and I was fearful that a) we wouldn’t get a ferry back and b) a piece of tree would land on the new toy and seriously spoil my day. Neither happened and we made it, after a very long squawk, back in time to tuck the yellow thing up in its new home and for Al to get off and see his mates. The trip was made almost completely on motorways and the Sportage's cruise control worked well for the towing, making life a lot more restful. Keep an eye on this blog for more action with the ‘Wee Yellow Beastie’ as we call it here, and a new blog following our progress on the rally stages, starting soon.
A week later I was out at the Abingdon Stages at Dalton Barracks for some action in the co-driver’s historic spec Mk1. We were using the van to tow this time and the Sportage had an easier job as support vehicle, aka somewhere else to hide when it starts peeing down. After a lot of fun we were forced to retire after four stages with a technical hitch and with the cruise control set in the Sportage, I wafted home.
The final job was helping to set up for the annual Midnight Walk, a fund raiser for Mrs C’s place of work, Banbury’s Katharine House Hospice. There were loads of bread rolls, packs of bacon and bananas to move to the local cricket club, enough to fuel the 600 or so walkers. Seats flicked flat, the Sportage was loaded to the gunnels, its livery conveniently matching Katharine House’s corporate colours.
I was marshalling at two points throughout the night during which it stair-rodded with rain and although mid-summer, was cold. I did learn at one point to be more careful prodding around for an interior light button because I inadvertently opened the electric sunroof a tad (whose switches are adjacent) but nothing seemed to leak despite the downpour. The night was a great success, the walkers were undeterred and the part leather seats survived unmarked despite the excessive dampness of the driver.
By Jesse Crosse
It’s amazing how your views on things can change once you actually give something a go. I’ve got to admit I read the Sportage blurb with some cynicism before it arrived, particularly the Sport bit. OK, the looks are ‘sporty’ enough but when I got to the bit about the high sheet metal glass ratio giving the feeling of sitting low in the cockpit, I started to glaze over a touch.
Actually its true, you can sit low and if anything the passenger seat, which in this model isn’t adjustable for height, is a little too low for Mrs C. who finds herself peering over the dash. But the handling certainly lives up to the claim, the steering is sharp, the nose turns in crisply and there’s very little body roll. All that makes the Sportage easy and restful to drive on the country roads where I live and I don’t feel as though I’m wrestling a Leviathon as I have done in some SUVs. Maybe the term ‘crossover’ isn’t as much marketing hype as I thought, the Kia is certainly quite car-like to drive for a biggy.
It’s great driving something more practical again after the Cayman too. The first airport trip with the two of us, ironically only involved cabin baggage so it didn’t really stretch things storage-wise. But long things, like the 6ft strip light I picked up for the workshop the other day can be lobbed in the back with no messing about. Rear seats are easy to work from the back of the car with a flick of a catch and a shove. Electric folding mirrors are useful for squeezing into an ancient multi-story I frequent, which was designed when the original Mini was current. Fuel consumption hovers around the high 30s at the moment which is a tad lower than the official 49.6mpg official figure, given that I don’t drive it like a hooligan. I’ll have to experiment with that as time goes on.
By Jesse Crosse
The Sportage arrived the other day and it doesn’t look as though I’ll be needing a course of therapy after all. After a couple of drives and a good poke around my new accommodation I don’t think the switch from Cayman to 4x4 is going to be as bad as I thought. Not because they’re similar, obviously, but because they’re so completely different.
There’s nothing wrong with a car-life-laundry now and again and what the Sportage lacks in raw performance it makes up for in convenience, comfort and decent equipment levels. I found my kind of driving position easily (thought there might be a big compromise on that one) and the the rear seat backs just fold flat on the squab with no fancy catches to find and fiddle – though it’s a shame they don’t fold entirely flat. The six speed ‘box is light with a slop-free gate, and the brakes are strong, but unlike some others not over-sensitive with it.
The electric power steering feels overly light at first but that’s only at low speed. On the move it progressively loads up and at cruising speeds has a good, meaty feel. Kia reckons the EPS is worth a 3.5% improvement in fuel economy over a hydraulic rack so I wouldn’t want it any other way. The engine is a torquey beast and the little change-up light in the instrument display is addictive and encourages short shifting.
Generally, the Sportage is an intuitive package, a bit like an Apple Mac, and the manual has so far stayed put in the glove box. The cruise control has a separate steering wheel button to arm it and another for set and resume – a neat setup. It’s not adaptive but likely to get used a lot on motorways, more to keep the lid on fuel consumption than through laziness. That said, there’s some towing to be done as well so it’ll be interesting to see what some serious haulage does to the fuel consumption.
By Jesse Crosse
Over the last few years Kia has emerged from the ranks of the also-rans to become a manufacturer of great looking cars underpinned by sophisticated technology and backed by that famous seven-year warranty. Tempting designer Peter Schreyer to move across from VW in 2006 was a masterstroke, and the third-generation Sportage is a great example of how his pull-no-punches approach lifted something from embarrassingly dull to pretty striking.
As luck would have it, a Sportage being shortlisted for the CAR long-term fleet coincided with my occasional need to tow a classic rally car around. I had my doubts as the Sportage is regarded as a ‘crossover’ rather than a full-on trailer-hauling SUV, and at first I reckoned it was probably all mouth and no trousers. Hopefully I’m wrong about that, as the four-wheel drive and manual 'box-equipped KX-2 2.0 CRDi can pull two tonnes, as much as a Land Rover Freelander, so despite the pretty face it should fit the bill. The fact that it’s a crossover and should be more car-like to drive, as well as look at, might also help with the sizeable culture shock I’m about to confront – my daily driver for the last two years has been a Porsche Cayman S.
Kia makes the job of speccing cars easy. Instead of the usual daunting options list, each model ‘is what it is’ to make the ordering process simpler. The KX-2 CRDi comes with a six-speed manual ‘box and costs £23,025. For that you get a basic audio system with iPod interface and Bluetooth phone connectivity with voice control, a multi-function steering wheel, cruise control, part-leather trim, basic air-con, an electric one-touch panoramic sunroof and reversing sensors.
The 2.0 CRDi makes 134bhp and 236lb ft torque, less than the 150bhp and 309lb ft of the lowest spec Freelander 2 TD4 engine but on the plus side, the combined consumption figure is slightly better at 49.6mpg (compared to 45.6mpg). The 17-inch alloy wheels may not be the most fashionable but bode well for the ride quality, while on the down side the headlights on the ‘2’ level cars are halogen and not xenon.
Despite the ‘one size fits all’ approach, there are a couple of extras on our Sportage. The ‘Byte’ blue metallic paint we’ve chosen costs £475 and the crucial tow bar is £386.99, making a grand total of £23,886.99. Overall, it’s an awful lot of car for the money, especially when you consider that seven-year warranty is good for 100,000 miles and transferable to subsequent owners.
Given the plentiful supply of quick cars on the fleet I thought I might skulk off quietly to enjoy the Sportage for the duration but I think I’ve been sussed. Appreciative noises are already leaking from the CAR offices and I’ve a feeling the keys might be nicked sooner rather than later.
By Jesse Crosse
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