I maintain with considerable conviction that anyone who buys a Tesla or a Chinese EV doesn't really like driving. Have you ever heard someone say how much they enjoy their soulless household-appliance-on-wheels after trading in a petrol or diesel equivalent? Never! Yet they sell by the thousands, and the numbers keep growing. My follow-up question when someone vaunts about their new EV is: What else did you look at? What did you say no to in order to hand over your money to BYD or Zeeker or Tesla?
The Medium-Sized Sedan Under $60K is the hottest corner of the new-car market right now. It's up 37% year-to-date on the same period last year, according to VFACTS.
Charging into that fight is the Kia EV4, a proper five-seat EV from a brand Australians already trust, with over 600km of range and a seven-year warranty. On paper, it should walk out of showrooms too. So why does it feel like the quiet one that arrived late to the party?
I've just spent a week with the GT-Line, the top of the three-variant range, in Snow White Pearl to find out. The short answer: this EV wants for almost nothing.
Design & Exterior
Let's start with the styling, because it's what people will argue about. Front on, the EV4 is a striking car. The vertical LED lighting signature is sharp, the face is confident, and it looks like nothing else Kia has done. It's from the rear three-quarter that opinion splits. The rear overhang is a bit weird, a slightly awkward resolution of a shape that's clearly been optimised for the cabin rather than the eye. In European markets you can have the EV4 as a Fastback, which with almost no rear overhang, throws off great EV6 vibes and, to my eye, is the better-looking car. Here in Australia we get the notchback sedan with a decent-sized boot, and you'll either make peace with the tail or you won't.
Dimensionally it's a genuine medium sedan: 4,730mm long, 1,860mm wide, 1,480mm tall, on a generous 2,820mm wheelbase. That long wheelbase is doing real work, as you'll see inside. The GT-Line gets the good gear to dress the shape up, 19-inch alloys in the GT-Line design, gloss black bumpers and mirror caps, automatic flush-folding door handles, privacy glass, and dynamic welcome and escort lighting that theatrically greets you as you approach.
The headlights deserve their own paragraph. The GT-Line's Intelligent Front Lighting System is a matrix LED setup with a soft-fade auto high beam that gently dips the beam around oncoming traffic while keeping the rest of the road lit. Plenty of cars claim this ‘matrix’ feature. Few do it as elegantly. In my experience, it's second to none at this price-point, and on a dark run home it genuinely changes how relaxed you are behind the wheel with the threat of nocturnal pedestrians.
Interior & Technology
This is where the EV4 stops being a curiosity and starts being a genuinely compelling thing to live with. The dash is dominated by the Integrated Panoramic Display, a 12.3-inch driver cluster and a 12.3-inch touchscreen with a 5-inch HVAC control pad slotted between them. The multi-zone temp and fan controls sit nicely below the vents on the centre console, allowing easy access.
The GT-Line also has a head-up display, which the lower variants sadly lack.
The front seats do everything. Both are 10-way power adjustable with power lumbar; they're heated and ventilated; there's driver’s memory; and Kia calls them Premium Relaxation Seats, which sounds like marketing until you use the Relax mode on a charging stop and understand the point. And yes, those premium mesh headrests are back, the ones with the faintly Bentley-ish feel to them that keep turning up in Kias and keep feeling more expensive than the car they're fitted to.
The Harman/Kardon system is glorious, an 8-speaker setup with a subwoofer that's a real step up from the 6-speaker unit in the cheaper variants. Wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are both here, as you'd expect, but I also found myself using Kia's native apps more than I usually would, the weather app in particular. DAB radio, sat nav, Kia Connect telematics and over-the-air updates round out a pretty full bag of connectivity.
Now, the practicality, because this is meant to be a family car. In the back, there's plenty of legroom. This is a proper five-seat family sedan, not a coupe pretending to be one, and that 2,820mm wheelbase pays off in adult-friendly rear space. Around town as a daily driver it's excellent.
There is a genuine trade-off, though, and it's in the boot. Luggage space is quoted at 490 litres, but the rear wheel arches noticeably intrude into the load area. On the flip side, those same arches help create the excellent cabin space. Kia has chosen people over suitcases, and for a family sedan I think that's the right call, but you should know the boot is quite literally shaped by that decision.
My one real ergonomic gripe is a small one that you'll trip over daily. The touch-sensitive Kia Connect button is placed exactly where your hand instinctively goes to reach the sunroof control, so you'll press it by mistake every time until muscle memory finally catches up. It's the kind of thing that a week of ownership (and a lot of unpleasant cursing) sands down, but it shouldn't be there in the first place.
Performance & Driving Experience
The GT-Line is the Long Range, front-wheel-drive car, with a single permanent-magnet motor making 150kW and 283Nm. It's powered by an 81.4kWh NCM lithium-ion battery, and the headline number is the one that matters most in this segment: 612km of WLTP range at a claimed 149Wh/km. Six hundred-plus kilometres of theoretical range genuinely changes how you use an EV. Range anxiety just isn't part of the conversation.
Over my week with the EV4 GT-Line I added 360km to the odometer at an average of 14.2kWh/100km. When I returned the car, I noticed the ‘Max’ range I could expect from the 83% SOC was 599km, so I am confident the EV4's quoted over-600 km range is achievable in the right conditions
It's not a performance car and doesn't pretend to be. 0-100km/h takes around 7.8 seconds and top speed is 170km/h, which is plenty. What makes it satisfying to drive isn't outright pace; it's the regen. Kia gives you steering wheel-mounted paddle-shift control over the regenerative braking levels, and I love it. Dialling the regen up and down with the paddles to minimise use of the actual brake pedal becomes second nature within a day or two, and it makes town driving smoother and more efficient. Five drive modes (Sport, Normal, Eco, Snow and a configurable My Drive) tune the rest.
Underneath is a McPherson strut front and multi-link rear setup, with a tidy 10.9-metre turning circle that makes it easy to thread through car parks. On the FWD front, would I like the option of a dual-motor version with more shove and all-paw traction? Sure. But for the daily commuting and family-hauling this car is built for, the front-driver is entirely sufficient, and it's the range-champion of the line-up because of it.
Two party tricks worth calling out. First, the full vehicle-to-load (V2L) capability, including an internally mounted residential-style power point in the cabin. Being able to run laptops and battery chargers straight off the car, from inside the car, is more useful than it sounds until the first time you need it. Second, Remote Smart Park Assist. Standing outside and edging the car into a tight space from the key is very convenient. Just don't lose your nerve the first time you watch it move without you in it.
Safety
Kia has thrown the full active-safety suite at the EV4, and the GT-Line adds the good stuff on top. Autonomous emergency braking with pedestrian, cyclist and junction detection is standard across the range, as are lane-keep and lane-follow assist, blind-spot and rear-cross-traffic avoidance, safe-exit assist and driver attention monitoring via an in-cabin camera. The GT-Line uniquely gets the Surround View Monitor and the Blind Spot View Monitor, plus parking collision avoidance and front and rear parking sensors. There's a full complement of airbags including a front centre side airbag. It's a comprehensively equipped car on this front, which is exactly what a family buyer should want.
Value & Verdict
So, back to the question I started with. As tested, the GT-Line lands at around $65,000 before on-road costs, which technically nudges it past the sub-$60K heart of the segment, though the cheaper Air and Earth variants sit squarely in it. For that money you get 612km of range, a cabin that shames cars costing a lot more, matrix LED lighting that's genuinely best-in-class, a cracking Harman/Kardon stereo, ventilated power seats, and front- and rear-seat conveniences the price rivals often skip, and Kia's seven-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty. That warranty matters enormously when you're being asked to trust a battery for the long haul, and it's something the newer Chinese entrants simply haven't proven yet, and Tesla doesn't match.
So what am I missing? Honestly, not much. The EV4 is very well appointed for the money; it's a lovely thing to live with, and it does the boring daily stuff - range, comfort, space, running costs - better than most of the cars people are buying. The catch isn't the car. It's that Tesla has a decade of head start on brand gravity, and the sharpest Chinese EVs win the spec-sheet-per-dollar shootout on paper before you've driven anything.
But specs on a page and a badge with momentum are not the same as a car that's genuinely good to own. The compromises here are honest and small: a divisive tail, a boot pinched by the wheel arches, a touch button in the wrong spot, and poorly placed HVAC controls. Against that sits a properly resolved family EV from a brand with a dealer in nearly every town that matters, and a warranty that outlasts the argument.
If you're leaning towards the Model 3 or the latest well-priced newcomer from China, take the EV4 for a test drive. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, and that, I think, is what everyone's missing.