2016 Kia Soul EV review: Electric toaster

[Suarez™]

Judged purely on its EV-ness, I think this Kia does everything it needs to very well. But at nearly $40,000, it just seems like a lot of coin. We’ll get back to that in a second.

This Soul is rated at about 90 miles on a full charge, plenty for my daily commute and then some. I drove it home the first night with an indicated 87 miles of range; my commute is about 17 miles and dang it if I wasn't exactly at 70 miles range when I pulled up to my door. And that was with the AC cranking. In the morning (I think I lost like two miles overnight), I kept it in B -- battery charge mode, which ups the aggression of the regenerative brakes -- and I only used 12 miles of battery to cover 17 in the real world. So kudos for that, Kia. B-mode does a good job of slowing the car down too -- if you plan ahead a bit, you barely have to use the brakes thanks to the strong regen.

The Soul EV isn't particularly slow, and I could stay at 80 mph on the freeway all day long -- well, at least until the battery ran out. I did enjoy getting into the red zone of the speedo, which is about 87 mph. I’m guessing your range goes down precipitously after that.

The base Kia Soul weighs about 2,800 pounds, and this electric model has about 500 extra pounds of heft to move around. It stays relatively flat in corners, and steering weight and feel are better than I expected. While I dodged most potholes, I did hit a few, and there wasn’t very much noise in the cabin.