1.6 GDI Hybrid 139bhp 4 DCT 5dr

Don't buy a Niro unless you hate your neighbours

Be warned!! The Kia Niro HEV (and other models) features an enormously loud reversing alert which can be heard inside a house 50 ft away and over 100 yds away in the open air. If you have to reverse the car late at night or early in the morning, you will disturb your neighbours. You will also get strange looks from passers-by when parking in the street or supermarket car park. You might as well buy a bin lorry. They don’t even do the safety job they are intended for as the noise travels too far and is too non-directional to let pedestrians know which car is about to reverse. Other car manufacturers have much better solutions to this need. If I had realised the nature of the reversing alarms before taking out a contract to purchase my Niro, I would have walked away.
That aside the HEV Niro is easy to drive and the automatic gearbox is effective in most situations. It is not a thrilling car but you wouldn't expect that. It is brilliant at hill-starts, the car just stays where it is until you push the accelerator.
The gadgets make too many noises, especially the Windows 98 type start-up and shut-down tunes, which cannot be turned off. It is also annoying that the automatic lane guidance on/off switch is so hard to access on the move as it can be annoyingly over-effective at times. However, the blind spot and rear crossing alerts are genuinely useful.
The smart cruise control is a revelation, I always thought that cruise control was unsuited to British motorways but the Kia's is excellent. Tell it what speed to go and it will adjust to the vehicles in front, automatically steer to stay in lane and yet let you take control at the press of a pedal or turn of the wheel. Very useful on long, tiring, motorway journeys.
The auto dimming main headlights are also surprisingly good. Reacting almost as well as an attentive human, even on bendy country roads, though they take a second or so longer to turn the full beams back on than I would like.
The car feels spacious in both the back and the front and visibility is good, though the rear-view mirror feels a bit small.
The boot is quite small and on the 4 model the subwoofer takes up a bit of it. However, if you do not have a spare tyre (not fitted as standard) then you can get quite a lot of unstructured objects (e.g. Christmas presents) under the boot floor.
The JBL hi-fi fitted to the 4 model is a bit underwhelming. It's ok but nothing special.
The 10" screen is clear but the control icons are a bit small and can be hard to hit, especially on the navigation map as they are positioned on the edge away from the driver (in RH drive vehicles anyway), so you sometimes miss and often have to take too much attention away from the road.
However, the voice functions for navigation are simple to use and the Kia app allows you to plan destinations at home on your phone and send them to the car over the internet.
Sadly, the map data is quite out of date, missing 4-year-old roads near me. Kia have just changed from making you pay a dealer to update maps and software to DIY recently. However, users have seen a lot of bugs, some quite serious, when doing this (Jan 2022).
Making phone calls using voice commands is simple, I haven’t tried the Android Auto connectivity.
My wife loves the car as it doesn’t feel too large and is easy to drive. I find it a bit uninvolving, but I have got used to that and, once you have got everything set up and worked around Kia’s poor manuals, most of the kit works ok. I haven’t had it long enough to know about reliability.
However, my intention was to get a Kia HEV as a trial for moving on to a full EV Kia in a couple of year. I can now say I will definitely never buy a Kia again as long as they feature the antisocial, ineffective and aggravating external reversing alarms. Kia seem to have no interest in changing these, so I guess I won’t be a Kia driver for more than a couple of years. Make sure you listen to these before deciding to buy.

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