The New Kia Sportage: fully electrified, unnecessarily fun and styled like an eco-space station

The engineers at Kia must have been given a week off and an unlimited supply of coffee because what they have packed into the new Sportage defies all rational expectation. It now comes in mild hybrid, full hybrid and plug-in hybrid versions. While that may sound like a vegan restaurant menu, in real life it means the Sportage can move more quietly, more cleanly and more economically without making you feel like you need to sprint to the nearest petrol station. You can choose a little bit of electricity, a lot of electricity or the kind that actually plugs into your house.

On the outside, the car boasts a tiger nose grille, Star Map LED lighting and wheels available in 17, 18 or 19 inches, which you can pick the way you’d choose pizza crusts. And if you go for the GT-Line, you get an exclusive look that suggests you do not drive this vehicle just to collect milk.

Step inside and forget everything you thought you knew about compact crossovers. There are two sweeping digital screens, crisp new instrument clusters and a dashboard that looks like it was built during a quiet collaboration between Bang & Olufsen and NASA. The seats are wrapped in suede made partly from recycled materials, as is your conscience after driving on LPG. In the GT-Line, the interior resembles a boutique hotel suite where every button seems to know your intentions before you do.

Then there’s the tech. The Sportage raided a technology expo and consumed half of Google’s cloud services. It now includes Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, YouTube streaming, arcade games, Kia Connect, and a digital key that turns your phone into an access pass like the car is just another app in your digital ecosystem. You can pay for parking directly from the infotainment system. To keep your children quiet and possibly sedated, you can hook up five devices to the onboard Wi-Fi and stream enough content to make a long drive feel like an in-flight entertainment system on wheels.

Safety features? Of course. The Sportage will brake if someone jumps in front of you, keep you centred in your lane, change lanes when you ask nicely, monitor the car ahead and keep a polite distance. It can even take over the steering in certain situations. It is not fully autonomous, but it knows enough to make it feel like it might be auditioning for it.

As for boot space, you start with 587 litres and go all the way up to 1,776 litres when the rear seats are folded. That is enough to fit a tent, a dog, your mother-in-law’s weekend luggage and, probably, that IKEA wardrobe you have been promising to collect for six months.

The low centre of gravity, sharp handling and new hybrid gearbox all make the car feel much more agile than any SUV has the right to be. It is not just practical. It is genuinely fun to drive.

Production begins in Slovakia and the first cars will arrive in showrooms by July. Pricing will be revealed closer to the launch date, but knowing Kia, it will probably cost less than it feels and drive better than it looks. Which, given the space-age styling, is saying quite a lot.