Kia Picanto Road Test
It’s a tiny car, and a huge one. Because while Kia has been making strides in other segments with vehicles like the Cee’d and Sportage, the baby of its range, the Picanto, remains a crucial model for the firm.
The Korean manufacturer shifted more than a million examples of the outgoing Picanto over its seven-year life span and believes this new, more mature incarnation has the potential to build on that success.
The Picanto certainly looks like it’s grown up. Gone are the cute but unmistakably Far Eastern curves of the original, replaced by Peter Schreyer-influenced sharp lines everywhere. The main cues are the Kia ‘family face’, widened bumpers that give the car an unusually chunky head-on appearance and particularly neat, angular tail-lights.
There will also be a three-door version for the first time; it’ll turn up before the end of this year, with more sporty styling helped by redesigned bumpers. But in the meantime, the five-door will launch this summer equipped with two engines: a 1.2-litre, four-cylinder unit producing 84bhp, and the 1.0-litre triple tested here.
This 68bhp motor can deliver CO2 emissions as low as 95g/km when fitted with stop-start, although in this price bracket we’d quite understand if Kia elects to offer the three-pot only in regular, 99g/km form.
Inside, the Picanto feels modern and airy. The plastics are still hard, but the texture patterns employed on the dashboard – and a strip of brightening chrome that runs across the centre of the fascia – give it a more classy air than you’ll find in its stablemate. The driving position is comfortable, despite the fact that you sit a little high and the seats are short on lateral support.
On the road, the Picanto isn’t rapid. But the three-pot produces its peak torque at 3500rpm and provided you don’t push it too far beyond that point, it’ll pull quite sweetly. The engine note is more of a mechanical grumble than a metallic rasp, and once you reach a motorway cruise of 70mph it fades to a surprisingly low level anyway. Wind and road noise are quite well suppressed too, the latter helped by tall 14in tyres on more lowly models.
To watch the new Picanto video please here.....essexautogroup-YouTube
