Seven seater comparison review: Kia Carnival S

First published in the October 2016 issue of Wheels magazine, Australia’s best car mag since 1953.

The Kia Carnival S confines its brief to ‘movement of the people’. Succeeds.

Can’t wait to see the final score? Jump to the verdict now.

THE transformation of Kia’s Carnival from an unrefined, undercooked misery bus to something genuinely impressive has been so profound it probably deserved a different name. But Carnival it stays, and this time it’s worth paying for a ride.

Sharing DNA with its Sorento platform buddy, the Carnival takes a very different approach to ferrying bodies. It’s much bigger than the Sorento – 335mm longer and 95mm wider, riding on a 280mm-longer wheelbase, meaning you’ll need a McMansion if you want to garage it – yet the Carnival successfully marries handsome styling with luxurious space, which isn’t easy for a base-model people mover.

Surprise-and-delight features abound. A sliding front-centre armrest disguising an enormous bin; ingenius ‘stand-up’ centre-row seats that literally flip to a vertical position and slide forward for maximum entry room; side windows for the middle row that actually wind (electrically) down; reclining backrests in every row. Hell, in the back deck you get speakers, lights, air vents and two cupholders on each side, making it the go-to position for kids trying to escape the family unit. Unlike the rough-riding, poorly packaged Odyssey, this is a proper people mover designed to do exactly what it says on the tin.

For such a big girl, the Carnival is no slouch. Its 3.3-litre V6 is tuned to offer a bit more grunt than the Sorento’s donk to offset its two-tonne tubbiness, yet the difference between the siblings is negligible, in both performance and economy.

Spending $4K more on an Si with a leather wheel, auto-fold mirrors, sat-nav and tri-zone climate is probably money well spent. But no matter what the spec, Kia’s Carnival is an almost-suave people mover that packs the engineering solidity and amenities to overcome the nameplate’s chequered past.

Grunt my ride

Any parent out there familiar with sprinting from one child’s sporting event to another will be pleased to know the Carnival can comfortably hold its own in the traffic-light stakes. Foot flat from zero to 160km/h (the old imperial ton) – surely a prerequisite with this type of vehicle – the Carnival is barely a softball mit away from breaching the magic 20-second barrier (at 20.2sec), and is just a second off the pace of the Kluger (19.3sec), Sorento (19.1sec) and CX-9 (19.1sec). Hard-charging award goes to the Santa Fe and Pathfinder (both 18.8sec for 0-160km/h), while the wooden spoon gets passed (slowly) to the Volkswagen Multivan (0-140km/h in 29.1sec!).