A COOL MINIVAN?
Kia’s new Sedona hauls the family in style.
This is what my life has come to: parked in a mall outside a Jamba Juice in a minivan, with the A/C on and Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off cranked up to full blast. Say, this song is kinda catchy. Haters gonna hate hate hate and something something something doodly-do.
No! Stop! Where’s my iPod? I think I have some Motörhead on there — what happened, man? I used to be cool!
Ah, the minivan, official vehicle of the used-to-be-cool. When David Byrne sang of finding yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile, I think this may have been what he was talking about. “How did I get here?” Well, you had a kid. And then you had another kid. And then maybe you had another kid, or your kids did that thing where suddenly every time you need to go anywhere or do anything there’s an entire squadron of friends, cousins and neighbours who also need to be ferried along.
Happily, Kia has a solution to the minivan blues. Step one: pretend it isn’t a minivan.
This is the new Sedona, which Kia calls an MPV. It has two sliding doors, three-row seating for up to eight, more cupholders than a Cineplex Odeon, and easy-clean seats. It’s not a minivan though. No, sir. Wink.
Step two: make it look good. Well Kia, good job.
If you’ve read a review of any Kia product in the last half-decade, doubtless head designer Peter Schreyer’s name has come up, as well as passing reference to his time at Audi. While Audi doesn’t build a minivan — ahem, MPV — if they did, you get the sense that this is what it would look like. The Sedona is nicely angled, broad-shouldered, crisply defined. Those are 19-inch chrome-looking alloys on the top-level model, along with HID headlights and LED accents.
Good stuff, and then we get to the interior goodies. Once you get past the idea that owning a minivan might mean that your vintage leather motorcycle jacket gets hung in the closet for good, there’s much to love about these boxy behemoths. On the whole, they’re just so incredibly useful — no vehicle is better at schlepping around people and their stuff except, perhaps, a Greyhound bus.
The Sedona is no bus. In fact, if you opt to spring for the top-end model, it’s actually something of an aircraft, with twin mid-row captain’s chairs that feature pop-up supports for your legs, La-Z-boy-style. The middle-row even gets its own power sunroof — if it’s a brace of teenagers that you’re hauling around, don’t take them along with you to the showroom or they’ll be bugging you to pony up to the top-spec SXL just so they can travel business class.
But let’s talk about what you, the driver, gets up front. Firstly, the front seats are extremely comfortable, and on SXL trim and up are both heated and cooled. In the hot California sun, this last is a pleasurable luxury, keeping your shirt from sticking to your back on long drives.
The overall look and layout of the Sedona’s dashboard is pleasant and relatively uncluttered. USB and auxiliary connections are mounted up front, and there are two gloveboxes for the passenger seat, one of them cooled. Cubbies are voluminous and plentiful, and those in the lower middle both have additional power jacks for charging stuff. The centre cubby has a curious sliding arrangement that’s less of a capacious bucket than you find in other vans, but it can be configured to swallow a decent amount of cargo.
The touchscreen interface for the infotainment system, available on LX models and up, is speedy and now includes swiping functions. It doesn’t have the full suite of pinchto-zoom smartphone-like capabilities that you can find on something like the Subaru Outback, but it’s crisp-looking and easy to use.
Navigation is only available on the top-level SXL+ trim, where it comes packaged with safety features like lane departure and forward collision warning, as well as a powerful Infinity audio system to really crank out that early Metallica. Just kidding — you’ll likely be playing your daughter’s Taylor Swift iPod playlist.
It also comes with a 360-degree around-view camera, which has to be the single great- est innovation in the past few years when it comes to parking. Self parallel-parking? Who cares. The ability to nose a big beast like this into a narrow spot with perfect alignment every time? Genius. You can also hit a series of buttons to switch between various cameras if there’s a tricky area, and the rear-view camera has an indicator which helps you gauge which way your wheels are turned.
Of course, all these toys only come on the very highend model, which tops out at an MSRP of $45,995. There are seven different trim levels for the Sedona, ranging from the base L which undercuts the Dodge Grand Caravan slightly in price, all the way up to the SXL+. If you have younger kids, it’s not just that the SXL+ might be a little too pricey, it’s that it might not be the one you actually want.
While those aircraft-style middle-row seats are supercool and very comfortable, they don’t fold very easily, and getting access into the thirdrow seat is a bit difficult. Ac-
In the twisty bits, the Sedona’s actually very well-behaved
tually, the third-row seating is something of an Achilles heel for the Sedona — that styling has raised the windows up so that a kid-sized person can’t really see out. The two-stage folding process to get the third row folded flat is also a little more involved than other minivans in the segment.
However, step down to the volume-selling SX model in the mid-$30K range, and you find something of a sweet spot in the Sedona lineup. It has power for both sliding doors and the liftgate, heated seats front and rear and a heated steering wheel, and a blind spot monitoring system. You also get a really neat feature in the trunk: a detachable flashlight built into the right side of the space, perfect if you’re rooting around for a spare diaper.
All great stuff, but the main reason the SX and below models are the best for younger families is in the clever way their mid-row seats fold. One pull on a lever and the entire thing raises up and kneels down, looking a bit like a genu- flecting monk. This slides the seat right up against the front seats, making it easy for the soccer team to all clamber in, and if you periodically use your minivan to haul larger objects, it’s a simpler solution than having to remove the seats entirely.
Once everyone’s onboard, it’s time to take to the roads, and here the top-level Sedona again has a trick up its sleeve: radar-guided cruise control. Hammering along California’s seemingly unending highways, the cruise control handled the ebb and flow of traffic with ease, more smoothly than it does in sister company Hyundai’s four-cylinder Sonata. Fuel economy ratings vary a little thanks to changes in the overall weight of the Sedona based on equipment, with SX models seeing 12.9 litres per 100 kilometres city and 9.5 L/100 km highway under Canada’s new five-cycle testing. The thirstiest SXL model hits 14.2 L/100 km in the city and 10.5 L/100 km on the highway.
There are three selectable driving modes for SX and up trims, and on the open road either Eco or Comfort are best (there’s no Sport mode). Heading up into the canyon roads, Eco mode’s tendency to upshift early isn’t all that detrimental to performance. The Sedona’s 3.3-litre directinjection V6 makes 276 horsepower at 6,000 RPM and 248 pound-feet of torque at 5,200 RPM. Despite a heft above 2,000 kilograms, the engine has plenty of punch to get past a heavily laden Winnebago on a short passing stretch.
In the twisty bits, the Sedona’s actually very wellbehaved. This ribbony stretch of pavement, the Ortega highway, is a favoured haunt of sportbike riders, who slice into the turns with daredevil leans. That’s not really what the Sedona is built to do, but an increased use of high-strength steel in its chassis means that this big-box van is actually fairly stiff, and well-composed. If you’ve little ones onboard, you’re probably not whiteknuckling it through the turns anyway, but rest assured that the Sedona doesn’t wallow.
After our run through the mountains, it’s back down to the sea, and I pull the van up alongside a marina where two wooden sailing ships are tied up. One of them’s called Pilgrim, and it reminds me of something I’ve long felt about minivans. They’re the sort of wheeled equivalent of an old sailing vessel like this, a selfcontained world of juiceboxes, errant pieces of Lego, and curious pairs of eyes peering out at the world as it passes.
This new Sedona seems a worthy vessel for families on the go. Still hung up on trying to recapture your cool? Well, as Ms. Taylor says, just shake it off, shake it off.