Upwardly mobile

Gets to grips with the new fully loaded diesel Sportage

The Kia Sportage arrived on our roads in 1993 as a boxy, unreliable, utilitarian style vacuum. Kia was a newcomer to Britain, peddling budget South Korean cars by the hundred rather than the thousand, and the brand was probably at the bottom of the desirability pile. Two decades later, and the fourth-generation Sportage shows how far the brand and the model have come. More Brits buy Sportages than almost any other SUV, making it one of the brand’s most important models, and Kia has worked hard to put the cheerful into cheap. The Sportage is roomy, robust and flexible – more so than some competitors – and it feels built to withstand the realities of family life. The back seats are comfy enough for a couple of large adults to travel in comfort and the huge flat-bottomed 491-litre boot would accommodate everyone’s clobber with ease. The Sportage offers more than a suggestion of off-road performance. Four-wheel-drive adds real practicality to this SUV, especially with the button that splits torque equally between the front and rear wheels. The Sportage drives nicely. The 1.7-litre diesel feels like it has much more power than it really does, and the manual gearbox can be fun when you ask it. Body roll is well contained and the ride is fine with all but the very largest alloys.

The seven-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox is too fluffy to express any real sense of urgency when pulling out at junctions. This is true of the 2.0-litre diesel, too, even in the pricey top-spec First Edition model.

It manages the car’s torque well at low speeds, though, and is at least quite quiet. In fact, the pricing makes this a curious model. The car starts at around £18,000, which will buy you a very basic – but still perfectly adequate – SUV.

At the other end of the scale, the £33,000 ‘first edition’ has all the bells and whistles (including the underwhelming auto box) but competes with Land Rover and Audi.

The ‘best’ Sportage is probably the manual 1.7-litre diesel in KX-4 trim, but at around £30,000 many will head in the direction of a premium competitor. In short, the midrange Sportages are excellent value. The Kia Sportage will be a hugely popular car, mainly among people who want to pay between £20,000 and £30,000 for a big, roomy, family barge. It’s hard to recommend the most expensive Sportages, as they’re up against some seriously good alternatives, but a mid-range four-wheel-drive model will be all the car most families will ever need.