While sales may have slowed for EVs, the release of new models has anything but. We sometimes get a bit of flack for our percentage of EV reviews compared to straight petrol-powered cars, but if that’s the majority of cars we receive to test, then that’s what we test.
DriveLife went to the launch of the Kia EV5 in 2024, and found it to be pretty much a Honey I Shrunk The Kids version of Kia’s EV9. Almost identical, and with a very similar interior, but simply smaller.
Does that mean it’s not worthy of considering if you are looking to buy an EV SUV? With the EV9 priced at well over $100K, that puts it out of reach of many buyers, so perhaps that’s where the EV5 comes in.
What’s it like to live with this all-new model for a week?
What We Like and Dislike About The 2025 Kia EV5 Light+
| What we like | What we don’t like |
| Interior design and quality Seat comfort Day-to-day driveability Design Space Flat floor when seats down One-pedal driving Adaptive regeneration Ride quality | Lane Keep Assist Traffic sign recognition Unlocking issues Lots of cheaper competitors Light on features vs. price |
What’s In The 2025 Kia EV5 Range?
There are 5 models in the Kia EV5 range:
- Light $67,990
- Light+ $70,450 (tested)
- Earth $75,450
- Earth AWD $80,450
- GT Line $85,450
The first three models are front-wheel drive, while the Earth AWD and GT Line are all-wheel drive.
Front-wheel drive models have a 160kW electric motor that outputs 310Nm of torque, while AWD versions have an additional rear-mounted 70kW electric motor that manages 170Nm of torque.
All models are fitted with an 88.1kWh EV battery pack, giving ranges varying from 500 to 555km. The 0-100km/h sprint in FWD models is 8.9 seconds, and it’s 6.1 seconds for the Earth AWD and 6.3 for the GT Line.
2025 Kia EV5 Colour Range
There is no charge for buying your EV5 in a different colour.
- Snow White Pearl
- Starry Night Black
- Shale Grey
- Frost Blue
- Iceberg Green Matte
- Starry Night Black + Snow White Pearl (two-tone)
- Starry Night Black + Shale Grey (two-tone)
- Starry Night Black + Frost Blue (two-tone)
- Starry Night Black + Iceberg Green Matte (two-tone)
For a full list of specs and options available for the 2025 Kia EV5, head on over to Kia’s New Zealand’s website.
How Does The 2025 Kia EV5 Light+ Compare To Its Competition?
| Make/ Model | Battery Capacity kW-hr | Power/ Torque kW/Nm | Range (WLTP), km | Boot Space, litres | Price |
| Ford Mustang Mach-E Standard Range | 75.7 | 198/430 | 440 | 519 | $74,990 |
| Tesla Model Y | 75 | 220/420 | 466 | 854 | $73,100 |
| Kia EV5 Light+ | 88.1 | 160/310 | 555 | 513 | $70,450 |
| Nissan Ariya Engage | 64 | 160/300 | 398 | 466 | $59,990 |
| Volkswagen ID.4 Pro | 77 | 150/310 | 519 | 543 | $59,990 |
| Toyota BZ4X | 71.4 | 150/266 | 485 | 452 | $57,990 |
| LeapMotor C10 | 69.9 | 160/320 | 420 | 581 | $54,990 |
| MG4 Essence 64 | 64 | 150/250 | 435 | 350 | $52,990 |
| BYD Atto3 Extended Range | 60.5 | 150/310 | 420 | 440 | $51,990 |
Please note that DriveLife does its best to ensure the information above is correct at the time of publication, however, prices, specifications and models can change over time. Please bear that in mind when comparing models in the comparison table.
First Impressions Of The 2025 Kia EV5 Light+
As mentioned, the EV5 could easily be considered to be a car where the designers took the EV9 and then did a pinch-and-zoom in. That’s not a bad thing – it’s still a great-looking SUV, very sleek and modern. Will those sharp lines mean it ages badly? Time will tell.
Our test car was finished in Iceberg Green Matte, and that made it stand out from all others on the road. I got many, many looks in the EV5 as it glided past other cars or pedestrians. Even a friend – who has no interest in cars – said, “That is a fantastic-looking car”. She’s right – I think it looks even better than the EV9 and in my view, the smaller size has improved its overall appearance. Smaller size, though? One other comment from someone else was, “my God, it’s a tank”.
What’s The Interior Like In The 2025 Kia EV5 Light+?
With an ivory headlining and pillars, and a wide interior, the EV5 feels large and welcoming. It’s a very pleasant place to enter the first time, and even after a week and 500km, I still enjoyed jumping in the car. It felt quite homey.
Part of this might be down to the unusual centre console arrangement. It doesn’t go back to the seat, and instead there’s a sort of small jump seat there, but it can’t be used as a seat. Memories of bench seats in cars? Very much. So instead of a centre cubby to store your stuff in, there’s a small, tight pocked for slipping in a cellphone? I’m not sure what else could fit in there. It does feel a bit like change for the sake of it, but it also makes the cabin feel wider and a little old-school, as you can at least pretend it’s a bench seat. The driver’s seat in this car is electric (with 4-way electric lumbar adjust), but the passenger’s seat is manually adjusted.
Those seats in our test car, an EV5 Light +, are a mix of cloth and vinyl, and look great. They aren’t heated in the front, quite surprising for an EV and one priced at over $70K. The Light+ model does have a fake massaging system of sorts. So instead of having a normal massaging seat, the one in the EV5 pumps your back in and out, and that’s pretty much it. It can feel quite severe, and I did sometimes struggle to turn it off, so ended up avoiding it. It could be of use on a long trip? But it wasn’t for me.
The centre console is still there, in front of the centre of the front seat. It has both an upper and lower shelf, as well as cup holders in front of the console. There is no Qi wireless phone charging in this model. In the very front of the console are two USB-C ports and a 12-volt socket.
To put the EV5 in Drive, there is another old-school item on the right-hand side of the steering wheel; a column change, just like in the EV9. But it doesn’t go up or down, instead you twist it up for Drive, or down for Reverse. It’s one of those things that takes very little time to get used to. One thing that my brain still struggled with is the location of the Start button; it’s on the gear shift column too, right in close to the steering wheel. It’s almost hidden away, and will catch a few people out the first time they drive the car.
The car’s screen continues the EV9 theme of a single, widescreen display, much like other manufacturers are doing. No complaints from me on this front; most manufacturers struggled for a while there, trying to decide how to do the screens well, and a single pane of glass works very well – and looks good, too.
There’s a huge amount of both legroom and headroom for rear-seat passengers, who also have a single USB-C port in the back of the front seats, and aircon vents built into the B pillar. It’s quite nice in the back of the car with so much room, and it really emphasises the car’s feeling of openness back there. For storage in the rear seats, there’s a pull-out drawer that goes under the centre console. It’s surprisingly large and deep – very handy for those long trips, it’s a nice place to store cords and other junk.
The rear floor is completely flat, giving those in the rear that sense of space that is felt in the front.
The boot is an excellent size at 513 litres, and also has a large side pocket on either side, as well as a large amount of space under the floor for more stuff. Not only that, but the rear seats are cantilevered, so fold flat into the floor. There are so few cars that do this, it was excellent to see Kia going the extra mile to do this.
The front trunk (frunk) is listed as a huge 67 litres, so easily enough room for some charging cables and other junk you haul around in your car, but never use.
What’s The 2025 Kia EV5 Light+ Like To Drive?
On pick-up, our test car was showing 550km of range, and I aimed to eke out as much as I could from the EV5.
Hitting the road, this car does feel so much like an EV9, just smaller of course. The controls, interior brightness and general feeling is incredibly similar between the two models
In EVs, I generally set my desired brake regeneration (regen) mode to one setting that suits, and leave it there. Like the EV9, in the EV5 you can use the steering-wheel paddles to adjust the regen, all the way from 0 (coasting), and then 1,2,3.
If you hold the left-hand paddle for a few seconds, you’ll get i-Pedal mode, which is what Kia calls their one-pedal mode. This effectively means you can just drive with the ‘gas’ pedal and only use the brake pedal when stopping in a hurry. It does take some getting used to, as when you release the gas pedal, the EV5 will slow correspondingly to how much you have eased off the gas. You can also go into the infotainment system and change the regen settings between Slow/Smooth, Medium, or Strong. You can also change the brake settings between Normal and Sport, although I didn’t notice too much difference between them.
If you hold down the right-hand steering wheel paddle, the car enters Auto mode for regen, and this was my choice. This is adaptive brake regeneration, where the car will work out how much regen you need for any particular driving conditions. For example, if you are on the motorway and cruising along with no traffic in front of you and then a car pulls into your lane, and you ease off the gas, the EV5 will apply more brake regen to stop you hitting that car. If there are no cars in front of you, and you take your foot off the accelerator pedal, the car will coast. It’s a brilliant system that’s making its way into more EVs, and we welcome that.
While the Auto setting for brake regen makes Daily Driving the EV5 just that little bit easier, there are other aspects of the car that also help. While the EV5 is not double-glazed like the recently tested Nissan Ariya, it’s still a car that has road, tyre, and wind noise well sorted. It’s not quite soundless in the cabin, but it’s still very impressive.
That’s not to say the driver will feel disconnected from the drive; while it’s not exactly an engaging car to drive, the target market for this EV will love the serenity and the general driveability of the Kia EV5.
I mainly used the EV5 for the weekly commute, and it shone in this role. Along with the things already mentioned, the sun visors are the sliding type, so you can always block out the sun coming in through the driver’s window. While some cars have extremely annoying overspeed alerts, the EV5’s is a nice, polite ‘bing’ that doesn’t go on forever and a day. You’ll also get warnings of hazards like pedestrian or railway crossings.
The reversing camera resolution is excellent, and there is a standard 360-degree camera system, the one where you can spin the car around on the screen with your finger, to check for hazards around you.
Not all was perfect in my week with the EV5. While steering assist is very good on this car, and will keep the car centred in the lane quite nicely, it’s operated by a separate button on the steering wheel. That’s fine, but steering assist in the EV5 stays on after you have turned adaptive cruise control off, or have cancelled it. This caught me out quite a few times, where I would turn off cruise control and forget steering assist was still on. Not the end of the world, and I expect eventually an owner would get used to it.
One item that I feel needs some tweaking is the EV5’s lane keep assist. While steering assist keeps you in your lane, lane keep assist will warn you if you are touching the fog lines on the left side of the road, or the centre line. In the EV5, it felt like I was fighting lane keep assist a lot of the time, and that’s not fun. You can turn it off in the menu system, but due to ANCAP and safety ratings, it always comes back on again the next time you start the car.
One driver assistance feature that works as it should is the driver attention monitoring system. While many (mainly Chinese) brands struggle to get this right, it works so well in the EV5 that you forget that it’s there – unless you do get distracted by something for too long, and then get a warning. This is how it should be, and other brands might want to take note of how it should be done.
Another surprising issue was the car’s reluctance at times to unlock when pressing the indentation on the door handle. It would take me two or three pushes to get the car to unlock, and sometimes it just wouldn’t, and I need to dig for the key in my pocket. Speaking of the key, the Light+ model has Kia’s Remote Park Assist key, that allows you to park the car without being inside it. This is handy for those tight parking spots where you wouldn’t be able to exit the car after parking. You can also use the key to extract your EV5 (forward or backwards) from a parking spot.
The infotainment system feels like a carry-over from the EV9, and likely it is. That’s just fine, as it works very well, and is relatively speedy between screens. There’s a home screen showing you a map, audio, and EV settings, and then you can swipe right for two other screens of apps.
Finding the driver assistance settings can take a bit of digging, but some kind soul had programmed the ‘favourite’ button on the steering wheel to go straight to this screen.
Performance in the single-motor EV5 is more than acceptable. It’s not superfast off the line as some might expect, and the 0-100km/h time of 8.9 seconds reflects this. In saying that, midrange acceleration is excellent, making passing other cars quick and safe. You get the usual 4 drive modes in the EV5: Eco, Normal, Sport, Snow. These settings work as you’d expect, and it was good to see that if you put the car in Eco mode, it remembers this the next time you get into the car. I left the car in Eco mode for much of my driving; there’s plenty of performance in this mode for everyday driving.
SatNav is fitted as standard, and while this model of EV5 doesn’t have a heads-up display, the directions are shown on the dashboard as well as the centre screen. If you want to get funky with the dashboard, you can switch it between 4 different colours.
After stepping out of the Nissan Ariya Evolve a few weeks before the EV5, one big difference is the ride quality; it’s far better in the EV5 than the Ariya, and overall it’s a smooth-riding car to travel in.
Other niceties for your daily commute include a very smooth adaptive cruise control system, as well as Kia’s Blind Spot View Monitor, where the power meter or speedo will change to a blind-spot camera view when you indicate. You forget just how good this system is until you get back into a Kia and experience it. There’s also the usual blind-spot monitoring on the exterior mirrors.
While much of the car is controlled through the infotainment system, it’s good to see Kia has included some ‘hard’ buttons below the screen, to operate the AC. While they are actual buttons, they are flush against the plastic so you still have to look for the button you want to press. Through these buttons, you can control the dual-zone temperature, fan speed, and AC mode. There’s also a driver-only mode for the AC, which should save some power.
Seat comfort is high in this car, in fact some of the best seats I have sat in for a while. Nicely soft and plushy, but still relatively supportive.
Energy economy in the EV5 was a very good 18.2kWh/100km, compared to 18.5kWh/100km stated by Kia. So, did we get to the 550km range that the car showed on pick-up? I managed 360km of driving with 100km left – 460km of real-world range is still very reasonable.
READ ON TO CHECK OUT OUR SUMMARY OF THE 2025 KIA EV5 LIGHT+.
2025 Kia EV5 Light+ – Specifications
| Vehicle Type | Medium EV SUV |
| Starting Price | $70,450 |
| Price as Tested | $70,450 |
| Engine | Single electric |
| Power, Torque kW/Nm | 160/310 |
| Transmission | Single-Speed Reduction Gear |
| Spare Wheel | – |
| Kerb Weight, Kg | 2,045 |
| Length x Width x Height mm | 4615x1875x1715 |
| Boot Space / Cargo Capacity, Litres (seats up/seats down) | 513/1,713 Frunk: 67 |
| Energy Economy, kWh/100km | Advertised Spec – Combined – 18.5 Real-World Test – Combined – 18.2 Low Usage: 6-10 / Medium Usage 11-19 / High Usage 19+ |
| Towing Capacity Kg, unbraked/braked | 750/1,250 |
| Turning circle metres | 11.6 Small: 6-10m / Medium 10-12m / Large 12m+ |
| Warranty | 5 Years/150,000km 8-Year EV Battery Warranty 5 Years Roadside Assist 5 Years Kia Connect & Over-The-air updates |
| Safety information | ANCAP Rating – 5 stars – Link Rightcar.govt.nz – 5 Stars – KIA EV5 |
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