The new Kia Sportage

Having sold over 1.6 million third-generation Sportages worldwide between 2010 and 2015, Kia has brought us the fourth generation model.

Kia made use of the new Sportage during the world's longest test drive record-setting event and only catching glimpses of them on social media I was pretty excited to finally get to test one on launch.

Leaving a cold and wet Johannesburg on an early morning flight we arrived in Cape Town, after a short presentation by Kia management, we jumped into the new Sportage CRDi and hit the road.

Exterior

Make no mistake, the Sportage is a good-looking car. It has styling cues and lines that are easy on the eye.  A few new styling additions make an already good looker even better.

The headlights now sit much higher than the tiger nose grille line, making for an aggressive front end. There is also the addition of new ice cube style LED fog lamps on the tpo-of-range GT-line. A new range of alloy wheels ranging in size from 16 inch to 19 inch are now also fitted to the various models. Around the back, redesigned tail lamps connected by a strip now find a home next to and on the automated tailgate.

Interior

The new Sportage has really raised the bar for interiors. A selection of colours and two-tone options are available on the seats for SX and GT-Line models, with my favourite being the grey and black perforated leather on the GT-Line.

The interior is spacious yet has a feeling of coziness, maybe that was caused by the heated seats, not sure. With excellent tactile surfaces and a host of technological additions, the interior of the Sportage is a pretty welcoming place to be.

I was really impressed with the wireless charging mat in the centre console and the 7-inch touchscreen for the navigation. The controls fell easily to hand with minimal searching.

The drive

It becomes very easy to see why Kia chose the Sportage to use during their record attempt. A smooth supple suspension with a torquey engine made for a comfortable test drive around Clarens into the mountains.

The Sportage handled excellently around the twisty mountain road and then ate up the remaining climbs and descents into Elgin.

It was pretty difficult to get the Sportage to break character during the test drive. As a small SUV it handled everything we threw at it and more, and even though we ended up sitting in a traffic jam for a few hours, it wasn’t bad because the Sportage is an excellent vehicle and does what it does well.

Models and Pricing

Sportage 2.0 Ignite	R369 995
Sportage 2.0 CRDi EX	R487 995
Sportage 2.0 CRDi SX AWD	R567 995
Sportage 2.4 GDI SX AWD	R557 995
Sportage 1.6 T-GDI GT-LINE AWD	R599 995