Kia Sorento PHEV long-term test | Does this PHEV make sense?

Hedging bets is a strategy used to reduce the risk of losses. The chances of winning big may be lower, but the overall chances of winning are improved.

The Kia Sorento PHEV – and plug-in hybrids in general – could a useful analogy. The switch to a full electric car brings risks for many people. It requires changes in lifestyle and in driving habits, and for the few retail customers who may consider buying one outright, the residual value risk is high.

Likewise, remaining in a pure ICE car risks being on the wrong side of legislation introduce to drive consumer behaviour away from emissions-producing vehicles, or local low emission zones.

Full hybrids, while able to run on electric at low speeds for short distances, can’t drive a typical journey only using electric.

So you’d think a plug-in hybrid offers the best of both worlds. Driving the Kia Sorento PHEV, I’m not so sure.

On paper, the battery offers just over 30 miles of zero-emission driving, although during the winter months I’ve yet to drive it on a relatively short journey when the engine didn’t fire up and idle to generate heat for the cabin.

And to gain the larger battery over the full hybrid version of the Sorento, it has sacrificed 20 litres in the fuel tank. So for that you gain 30 miles of EV range where the full hybrid would happily spend 150 miles of motorway driving with that 20 litres of unleaded.

While short journeys can be comfortably completed on battery power alone (although with some engine idling), very long journeys result in refuelling stops.

Of course, you could argue that if you were in a full electric car, long journeys would also require stops, and with the PHEV, at least you’re on your way again a few minutes later, whereas recharging an electric car requires a coffee break.

This is all true, but at least a fully electric car would be drawing energy at a higher rate than the pedestrian 3.6kW that the Sorento can accommodate. It feels a bit like old tech when a 30-mile charge from my 7kW home charger takes more than four hours, and the public charging network has evolved with many more rapid chargers. I’m not going to spend four hours at a Welcome Break charging a PHEV, even if I could find a charger that would accommodate it.

So while my driving in the Sorento PHEV has been largely trouble free, I can’t help wishing it would do more. We’re in a brief window where legislation and tax still favours PHEV over cars that you can’t plug in, and the Sorento feels like it isn’t trying hard enough to demonstrate what the technology is capable of.

Kia Sorento PHEV joins our fleet - A sign of the chimes

I took delivery of the updated Sorento as a swap for our suddenly out-of-date EV6, whose loan with us had been overtaken by the launch of the updated model in October.

There’s no chance of that happening with the Sorento, as it had its makeover in the spring.

Our most recent benchmark on long-term test ahead of the updated model was the full-hybrid version we ran from late last year until the spring.

This time we decided to go for the plug-in hybrid variant to see if this could be a valuable stepping stone for someone in the transition process to fully electric.

The front of the Sorento has undergone a transformation giving it the family look introduced with the EV9. Equipment grades revert from the previous Vision and Edition (entry level and higher, respectively) to 2, 3 and 4, and our 4 is vaguely equivalent to the Edition grade units predecessor but the upgrade has added a few extra items.

That means it comes with heated and ventilated front seats, heated outer second-row seats, an opening panoramic glass roof, as found in the previous Edition grade, but an enhanced head-up display and camera display for the rear view mirror. For the former, when in cruise control mode, it displays surrounding traffic as animated blocks relative to your position, and for the latter, should you be carrying a full complement of passengers.

The adaptive cruise control also features an automatic lane-change function, where indicating to change lanes prompts the car to carry out the manoeuvre itself if the various conditions are met. For this it keeps the indicator running for the whole duration of the exercise.

The suite of driver assistance systems provide audible alerts and various chimes that can be heard throughout a typical journey in the Sorento. Of course, new cars since April 2024 now sound an alarm should the car exceed the speed limit. This can be deactivated manually, but comes on by default when starting the car.

That’s fine. Exceeding the speed limit can be dangerous. But it depends on the camera to recognise the speed limit from reading and recognising road signs, which it does not always achieve with accuracy, making the alert doubly annoying if you know you are well within the true speed limit.

Then there's another chime when the speed limit changes. That would be fine if my vision was below the standard required for driving. But it isn’t, clearly, as have been the holder of a driving licence for longer than I care to remember, and I haven’t been told there’s any reason why my eyesight is not up to the job.

What I’m getting at here, and the Kia Sorento is not the only car to engage in this ultra-intensive nannying of the driver, is that many of these alerts would be just as effective as a subtle visual warning on the instrument display, or head-up display in the case of our Sorento.

As things stand, the cacophony of alerts and warnings only serve to irritate, and discourage the driver from leaving the systems running where they can be switched off.

No doubt it’s something I’ll get used to as the months progress behind the wheel.