Great at what it does
Useful. No more, no less.
To be clear, this is not a twin test. A £40k SUV and a half-mil fettled Porsche have little in common beyond four wheels and a virtual tax disc. It’s classic apples and oranges, or pears versus bananas, not nectarines or peaches.
Both cars are, however, very good at certain things, and each barely even tries to do what the other excels at. In the case of the Kia, it’s all about the luggage and the seats and the floatingabove-it-all cruising ability. Whereas the Singer’s exquisite agility, its responsiveness, its extreme rapidity, its hand-crafted sensuality… they’re just not on the Sorento’s radar.
Just how useful the Sorento is really came home to me recently when, because we were having some work done at our house, I was essentially living in the car and had all my camera gear, not to mention some hygiene essentials and spare trousers, in the boot.
Oh the boot. The glorious, cavernous boot. The stats say its capacity is 608 litres with five seats in use, or 1996 litres with only the front two upright. This latter figure is way above average – more than a VW Touareg, for instance, or even the king of estates, the Skoda Octavia. The stats barely do it justice, though, as this is space that’s easily accessible and easy to see into, meaning it’s relatively quick and easy to retrieve stuff that I’ve slung in.
One thing, though. Considering this seems to be a super-reliable, tough, well-made car, I was surprised to notice the other day that one of the minor controls has become slightly dislodged. It’s a temperature adjuster for the third row of seats, and it still works, but it must have been walloped by something or something (almost certainly me and my camera gear) and has sunk slightly into its surround. When you’ve got used to a car feeling so robust that you can do pretty much what you like to it, this is a reminder that, like all of us, it does actually benefit from a bit of tender loving care.