The EV6 GT is still a heavy car, and its 2,185 kilo curb weight is felt through corners when driven fast. If it really gets unleashed, we suspect that physics will soon overcome the efforts of Kia’s engineers. Clearly, and despite its enormous power, this is not a car designed for track use. Kia says so themselves, admitting that while the GT was tested on the Nürburbring Nordschleife, it “has been developed very specifically for road use.”
As such, you probably don’t need to know that a “secret” drive mode shuts off the front engine, tells the traction control to take a few minutes off, and lets you slide the Kia with a tap of the accelerator. Fun for a few minutes on private land, but somewhat pointless the other 99.9 percent of the time.
Photo: Kia
Inside, the GT shares a very similar cabin to a regular EV6 equipped with the GT-Line option package. It is comfortable and fairly quiet at low speed just like any other electric car. However, wind noise generated by the wing mirrors (a hangover issue from the standard EV6) is louder than we’d want from a car costing just over £60,000.
The cabin is attractive, and the GT-exclusive semibucket seats add extra support, but aren’t as comfortable as the softer, squishier seats fitted to the standard car.
The twin 12.2-inch curved dashboard screens are the same as in the regular EV6, as are the touch-sensitive controls below them, which display icons for media and climate, but not at the same time. Kia has tried to reduce clutter here, but in doing so has a system that frustratingly doesn’t show any climate controls at all, unless you poke a touch-sensitive button to switch from Media and Navigation to Temperature. It then reverts back to what it was before after a few seconds instead of leaving the heating and cooling controls in place.
Kia’s wireless phone charger is grippier and more reliable than some we’ve seen, but the lack of wireless Apple CarPlay, a glaring omission in the existing vanilla EV6, remains unfortunate. The practicality is on par with its siblings with the same cabin and storage space as the regular twin engine variant, which means just 20 liters of storage under the bonnet.
Kia says it set out to produce a grand tourer reminiscent of comfortable, big-engined cars from the 1970s. The EV6 GT certainly has plenty of performance, and the suspension and differential changes show that the company has put a lot of effort into driving dynamics as well as straight-line pace. But the range of 262 kilometers does not live up to the GT bill.
And while super-fast charging via the car’s 800-volt technology will go some way to alleviating range anxiety, we wish Kia had held back on the outright performance and instead opted for a more leggy blend of speed and range.