The short version: I can see why Bobzilla is so stoked about these things.
We took a rented 2014 Kia Forte LX from Toronto to Quebec City and back. This was an alternative to a Mazda MPV with 250,000 km, and I figure the total rental cost us the extra gas we would have spent in the van, while being much quieter and Somebody Else’s Problem if it broke.
Lots of room in front, no real complaints from a 6’2” teenager in back, and enough trunk space for at least twice as much luggage as we had.
The LX has the smaller 1.8 L motor, and I never once felt underpowered, even in Montreal traffic. (Think: Boston, or whatever big city you don’t like.) The engine may actually have been a bit too much for the tires (OE Nexen with 40,000 km on them.) Also, the Nexens seemed pretty noisy. When I first got in the Forte, it seemed pretty darty, but it turned out somebody had the front tires at 42 psi and the rears at 32. Putting everything at 36 was much better. (Duh.)
This was the first car I ever drove that uses clickable steps to dim the dash lights. I’m used to a rheostat, and I thought the 7 or so pre-set levels was a dumb idea... until I actually tried it, and discovered that it’s an easier interface with no downside.
We kept finding stuff like that, where Kia engineers clearly started from first principles and solved problems logically. Good example: the seat heaters. Every other seat heater I’ve used starts from low and you can crank it up as high as you want. The Kia people evidently reasoned that if you’re reaching for the seat heaters, it’s because your butt is cold, so one push on the button gets you max heat. Once you warm up, you can crank it down if you want. Brilliant.
Not quite so brilliant: the headlights. Low beams were fine, with good coverage and a sharp cutoff. (Maybe too sharp: I would have appreciated a bit of vertical light spillage while trying to read street signs in strange towns.) The high beams, OTOH, just didn’t do it for me. They shot light up to the sides, like the wings of the Bat-Signal, but I honestly couldn’t detect any meaningful increase in forward distance. Of course, these were the most basic OE halogens, so maybe the HIDs at the top of the model range are better.
Fuel economy: I was blown away. I have no idea what Kia’s “Active ECO” actually does, and I can’t find out from the website, but Damn. On cruise control at 121 km/h (75 mph) on flat land (i.e., not downhill or anything), the instant fuel consumption readout on the dash frequently went as low as 2.5 litres/100 km, or 93 miles per US gal. I know you have to take onboard stuff like this with a grain of salt, but even if it’s optimistic by 20% it’s still amazing. I honestly couldn’t detect any penalty for having the Active ECO button pushed; maybe power is curtailed or the AC is reduced or something, but it was completely transparent to us for our purposes, which were, admittedly, just tourism on a pleasant fall day.
If you drive into a rainstorm on the highway, the back window stays dry until you slow way down. Somebody at the wind tunnel deserves a beer.
Conclusion: the Forte just went on the Definite Possibility list in our household.
Random trip note: the parking lot of the Wal-Mart in Trois-Rivieres is some kind of galactic nexus for first-gen Hyundai Accents. Just walking back to the car I saw five of them parked and one in motion. Weird.
