Quick Drive: Kia Sportage PHEV

14850 Magazine recently had the opportunity to test drive a 2023 Kia Sportage Plug-in Hybrid. Ithaca is a very good use-case for such a vehicle, which tends to get 20-40 miles of all electric driving on an overnight charge, and then can use their gas engine when further range is needed or when charging isn’t available. Traditional hybrids by comparison may be able to drive only around 1 mile just on the battery.

The all-wheel-drive PHEV Sportage competes range- and mileage-wise with a few other vehicles including the Jeep Wrangler 4xe, Toyota RAV4 Prime, Hyundai Tucson, and the Volkswagen Tiguan — but has the advantage of being on the lower end of the price range for this class of vehicle.

We drive the highest trim level offered, which is called the X-Line Prestige and lists around $44,000. The car has some really nice luxury features, including a panoramic opening sunroof with shade, heated front and rear seats and steering wheel, as well as ventilated cooled seats. It has an instrument cluster mounted in front of the driver, and then it continues in a panoramic way to the right where it becomes the entertainment system, which shares physical controls with the auto system which can turn out to be confusing – if you forget to set the mode you may turn down the temperature when you wanted to turn down the volume.

With promising specs such as all wheel drive, 1.6L turbo engine, 177hp with 195lb of torque, a 66.9kw battery which affords 34 miles of all electric range, and 430 total miles of range at 35 miles per gallon, this is respectable for vehicle this size.

Photo courtesy Kia.

There are several modes to drive in, including full gas, full electric, and hybrid. Since we would plan to do most of our driving around town with the battery, we mostly tested in full electric. Unfortunately, compared to some other vehicles like this in full electric mode, the Sportage was quite sluggish. This is probably because this car has a regular automatic transmission as opposed to a CVT, there are distinct shift points which cause it to lurch, and mashing the gas pedal down kicks it out of all electric mode and starts up the gas engine. This also happened when simply going up a steep hill. In terms of driving, that’s all we needed to see. Perhaps in a place that is more flat overall this would be a great solution for some, but for our hilly terrain this just makes this car less than ideal for all-electric operation, which is the main point of the PHEV. There are other hybrid vehicles such as the Toyota and the VW that would be better suited to this area, although they do come at a higher cost.

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