We go on and on about how making cars is hard. Startup after startup crumbles away, particularly in the world of electric cars. Somehow, though, Kia makes it look easy with the EV6, its first ground-up, dedicated EV.
Kia, of course, has it easy. Much in the same way that the Kia Optima is just a Kia version of the Hyundai Sonata, or the Kia Telluride is just a Kia version of the Hyundai Palisade, the EV6 is a Kia version of the Hyundai Ioniq 5. How Kia got away with getting an extra number out of the transition, I do not know.
The thing about these cars is that Hyundai and Kia have announced no actual specs yet. All we have about them is that Hyundai says that the Ioniq 5 will get around 483 km of range and recharge 80 per cent of its range in 20 minutes. Given that the EV6 and the Ioniq 5 share the same “E-GMP” architecture, we can expect similar specs.
It’s a real contrast to cars like the old Faraday Future FF91 or the Lucid Air, which have been at this same stage of looking ready for production for almost half a decade now.
Those are from startup car companies that have attractive designs, but struggle to get assembly lines up and running. What we’ve been waiting for is mainstream manufacturers — like Kia in this case — taking that same kind of design and running that through a fully-operational manufacturing entity. Not that major manufacturers don’t have trouble getting their new-generation EVs out to customers without problems, Ford in particular, but this is all starting to look, well, easy.