It may not be the newest EV, but it’s still one of the best. Here’s why Kia’s EV6 ended up in our garage and why charging rocks so far.
“That’s how fast it charges?” my wife exclaimed after making a quick pit stop inside a Walmart while I had our new Kia EV6 plugged into a fast charger outside. She was only gone about 10 minutes to grab a bottle of water and some snacks, but on a 350 kW Electrify America station like the one I was using, that was all the Kia needed to shoot from 39 to 80%.
I won’t publish what she said next, because InsideEVs aims to be a family website. But after years of riding shotgun with me on countless tests of electric vehicles with often subpar or hit-or-miss fast charging, let’s just say she was very happy with what the EV6 can do on a public charger.
Which, as any married person will tell you, is good news for me, because the EV6 you see here is mine. And that also makes it InsideEVs’ newest long-term test car.
Deputy Editor Mack Hogan isn’t the only staffer here to take advantage of this summer’s aggressive EV lease deals. While he recently picked up a Chevy Blazer EV to replace an aging Tahoe, I went with Kia’s EV6, netting a two-year deal I’m so far extremely happy with. I only get 20,000 miles with this car, but I’m already wondering if—or even how—it can stick around for more than that.
And now that I have two weeks and about 1,000 miles under my belt, I’m happy to tell you how this journey is going.
EV Shopping In Summer 2024
Though I’ve been testing EVs almost exclusively over the past few years (okay, I cheated twice and borrowed a Honda Civic Type R and a manual Toyota Supra; I regret nothing) I knew that 2024 was the year I wanted to put a modern one in my garage.
I knew I didn’t want to sell my 2018 Mazda 3 Grand Touring hatchback since it has less than 60,000 miles on the clock, is pretty efficient and, best of all, is paid off. Part of being sustainable when it comes to transportation is not being needlessly wasteful, after all.
But as we’ve covered lately, the EV leasing deals are just too good to pass up—and they may not last forever. Especially if the election changes some of the policies leading to generous price cuts through tax incentives. With the end of summer in sight, I decided to go for it.
So which EV to choose? We test-drove a Polestar 2, which I’ve always liked, as the deals on those are very good right now too. Ultimately, we decided we wanted something with a bit more cargo space to complement the smaller Mazda, so that was ruled out.
I also considered the updated Ford Mustang Mach-E, America’s top-selling EV that isn’t a Tesla. I’ve always enjoyed driving those as well. Unfortunately, I could find few models for sale near us in upstate New York, and with fewer aggressive price cuts and deals than other options out there. That got crossed off my list pretty quickly.
But it brought me to what I kind of always wanted anyway: one of Hyundai Motor Group’s E-GMP cars. I didn’t need something as big as a Kia EV9 and the Genesis GV60 was outside my budget. Honestly, I could’ve gone either way between the EV6 and the Ioniq 5; I’m a fan of both.
When I contacted professional car broker, InsideEVs contributor and longtime friend “Automatch” Tom McParland for help, he found me a deal on an EV6 Wind AWD in Rochester, NY that I couldn’t pass up. After a quick jaunt up to Vision Kia East Rochester—who were lovely, straightforward, knowledgeable and generally great to deal with—I got handed a set of keys and a world-class tool to take on the 330-mile road trip home.
More on how that went in a second.
Why The Kia EV6?
In years of testing various Hyundai Ioniq models, the Kia EV9 and EV6 and the Genesis GV60, I’ve always been amazed at what these cars bring to the table in terms of range, tech, performance and design. Pound for pound, I think they’re about the best non-Tesla EVs out there, apart from the stuff from China that we can’t even buy over here.
So I decided to vote with my dollars, as it were.
Admittedly, the EV6 isn’t as new and hot as Mack’s Blazer EV. It’s been on sale since 2021, which feels like decades in the EV world, but I think the specs remain highly competitive. (A much more comprehensive update and facelift is coming soon, but probably not until next year. As a matter of taste, I think the original looks better, anyway.)
313 miles on a full charge! We love to see it.
My EV6 Wind AWD boasts a 77.4-kWh battery pack good for an EPA-rated 282 miles of range, though at 100% I’ve been seeing over 300 lately. That’s excellent for a dual-motor car; it’s nearly on par with the single-motor Volkswagen ID.4 I tested recently. Single-motor EVs almost always get more range at the expense of performance, but very little gets sacrificed here.
Plus, the EV6’s more aerodynamic shape means it easily trumps the similar dual-motor Ioniq 5’s 260 miles of range. (You do sacrifice nearly 10 cubic feet of cargo space with the Kia, but it’s more than fine for our needs.)
With a combined 320 horsepower and 446 pound-feet of torque, the dual-motor EV6 is the most powerful car I’ve ever owned, and the quickest with a zero to 60 mph time that comes in under five seconds. Seriously, not bad; in Sport Mode on the highway, the acceleration veers into “lose your license” territory. It’s not as unhinged as the Kia EV6 GT, which can take down supercars, but that car’s performance didn’t feel worth the tradeoff for an EPA-rated range of just 218 miles.
So far, I’m averaging around 3.2 miles per kWh but have seen those efficiency numbers rise higher in more reasonable driving. I’m pretty pleased with almost all of it.
A Winner At Charging
I have a solar-powered ChargePoint Level 2 plug in my garage, so getting juiced up at home is no problem. That’s the case for every EV. But in the two times I’ve had to do it so far, the EV6 has acquitted itself extremely well at DC fast charging.
Since it’s still one of the few EVs out there with a true 800-volt electrical architecture, the EV6’s charging speeds are pretty world-class. It’s rated to charge from 10% to 80% in 18 minutes on a 350 kW fast charger. Those kinds of speeds aren’t available everywhere, but if you can find some, your EV6 should live up to the hype.
I didn’t even really track my charging speeds on the way home from Rochester, but I do know that after one stop at a gas station—for a bathroom break, not gas—I jumped from 30-something-percent to 80% in the time it took to use the facilities. Then, at the aforementioned Walmart a week later amid a trip to Pennsylvania for a wedding party, I pulled speeds of about 225 kW immediately and jumped from 39% to 80% in about 10 minutes.
If you believe, as we do at InsideEVs, that we need more public Level 2 charging everywhere and that DC fast charging is more for road trip “boosts” than full-on gas station replacements, then this is exceptional performance. Basically, the EV6 gives me enough juice to get back on the road in the time it takes to use the bathroom and maybe catch a moment of fresh air outside the car.
Like the rest of the E-GMP family, the EV6 is also great at plug-finding. The car will warn you that you may not have the range to hit your final destination, and at the touch of a button will direct you to nearby chargers listed at different speeds and stall availability. Just add that as a stop along the way and go—the car handles preconditioning by itself. It’s all very automated and user-friendly.
The rest of my charging will be done at home, and I think that’s the right approach for EV driving: We have to break up with the gas station-centric “go somewhere to fill up” paradigm and be more excited about the many benefits of charging overnight.
What’s Not So Good So Far?
I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say about the EV6 in the coming weeks and months. While I’m so far quite happy with the quickest, most powerful, most capable and least-polluting vehicle I’ve ever owned, here are a few early marks against it:
- The door handles. They aren’t great, at least on this trim level. Flush against the door itself, they’re a little tricky to pull out at times; on the GT and GT-Line models they pop out automatically, but that isn’t the case with my car. You also have to press the notch really hard to lock and unlock the doors. This drives my wife nuts because she keeps her key fob in her purse and almost never touches it. Not a dealbreaker, but I wish every EV6 just had the automatic pop-out handles; it would be worth the extra cost.
- Like on many E-GMP cars I’ve driven, the steering wheel has a weird way of blocking the central driver’s display. I can see almost everything there, but I don’t think it’s a great design. Maybe the more oval-shaped steering wheel on the 2024 EV6 will fix this.
- I still think that Hyundai/Kia/Genesis’ navigation systems, specifically their mapping, isn’t as good as many other rivals. The car’s built-in nav system has given me some truly goofy suggestions, while Google Maps can somehow find more up-to-date routes that are considerably shorter. Electric route planning and charger-finding may be very good, but the directions themselves are a bit lacking.
In the next few months, I hope to cover more on the EV6’s software experience, automated driving functions and actual range—including how it deals with an upstate New York winter and a possible cross-country road trip I’m planning for the holidays.
In the meantime, what do you want to know about EV6 ownership? Drop me a line in the comments or shoot me an email.
