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SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA – In 2021, Kia Motors took advantage of that year’s Los Angeles Auto Show to debut a new electric concept called the EV9. Today, Kia unveiled the retail version, which will be available in the second half of this year. His EV9 in production is definitely an evolution of the show car, though some of the concept’s more outlandish design details are toned down a bit.
This is a large three-row SUV that uses E-GMP, Kia and Hyundai’s advanced new electric vehicle platform, with newer EVs such as the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia’s EV6, ours and many others. Impressing people. These two crossovers are small, but the EV9 brings its 800 V technology to a larger vehicle and should suit North American tastes.
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The production EV9 has far fewer scalloped doors than the concept we’ve seen in 2021. It’s a bit shorter than the Kia Telluride, but has a much longer wheelbase.
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Kia has maintained an upright stance on the EV9’s exterior, maximizing interior space and maintaining its iconic SUV shape.
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“The journey of the past few years to get to where we are today in terms of design could only come about when designers and brands work together. It’s very much based on the idea of the movement,” explains Karim Habib, Head of Kia Global Design. “It’s about juxtaposition [a] Man-made structures in nature and how that contrast is actually quite beautiful, or even in nature itself.”
“As an example, you see these very tall, very boxy, triangular fenders,” Habib said. “But at the same time, it has a very sleek body with a very low center of gravity. It’s a little unusual for an SUV to have a low center of gravity. The belt line was also pretty low and there was a lot of glass.”
The most obvious change is the more normal headlights in the front. However, the distinctive vertical daylight running lights recalled his Kia’s “Tigernose” grille without an actual grille, making the transition from concept to production unscathed. Size-wise, it’s 3 inches shorter in length than the Kia Telluride SUV, and 1 inch taller and 3 inches wider than the traditionally powered Telluride, despite the significantly longer wheelbase.
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Interior space was an important consideration. “This is on his E-GMP architecture dedicated to him,” he explains Habib. “So we wanted to get the most out of it on the flat floor. You can see that we tried to really work on the dashboard, the doors, the console, and not just the objects themselves. The spacing between objects,” he says. mentioned the use of negative space juxtaposed with the EV9’s dashboard screen.
Its interior is much more conventional than the EV9 concept car, and the steering wheel in particular is perfectly normal compared to the rhomboid devices we’ve seen in 2021.
Refreshingly, there’s no Piano Black trim anywhere in the interior.
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“We don’t use piano black consciously,” explained Kia’s vice president of interior design, Jochen Paesen. “This time, I used a middle gray that is a combination of matte and gloss. It took a while for the black gloss to come out, and I’m fine without it,” Paesen told Ars.
