ABM Q4 - Flipbook - Page 50
REV I E W
KIA EV2 GT-LINE
It is a genuinely pleasant place to sit
for not much money.
It is a proper little family car, too,
which surprised me given how compact
it is, at just 4,063mm long, 1,800 wide
and 1,585 tall.
The back seats have real head and
legroom, enough for adults, the rear floor
is flat, and the ISOFIX points are reached
through neat little zips.
The boot is a class-average 362 litres
with a slightly annoying high load lip,
an adjustable floor and useful hooks,
and there is a near-token 15-litre space
under the bonnet on plusher trims, which
is exactly enough to swallow the charging
cables and nothing more.
A value proposition
Now for the part that made me sit
up, where the EV2 stops being merely
‘likeable’ and becomes a genuinely canny
fleet proposition.
Being a pure electric car, the EV2 sits
in the very lowest company car tax band,
currently just 3%.
The GT-Line I drove is priced at £28,995
including the full £3,750 Government
Electric Car Grant that knocks a useful
chunk off the sticker.
Run the tax sum on a car of that value,
and a higher-rate taxpayer is looking
at somewhere around £30 a month in
Benefit in Kind (BiK), and a basic-rate
driver roughly half that, for a brand
new, 261-mile electric car with a sevenyear warranty.
To put it in the context of the cars I
have been driving lately, that is less than
half what an equivalent petrol supermini
would cost in company car tax, a fraction
of what a mild-hybrid SUV demands, and
pocket change next to a diesel.
On a salary sacrifice scheme, the
numbers become almost embarrassing.
After weeks of watching options lists
shove cars over the £40,000 expensivecar tax threshold, it is a relief to report
that no version of the EV2 comes
anywhere close to that trap.
The rest of the whole-life case is
just as tidy. Efficiency of around four
miles per kWh means it costs pennies
a mile to run when charged at home,
insurance sits in a low group 21, and Kia’s
seven-year, 100,000-mile warranty is
transferable, flatters residual values and
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AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS
Q4 2026
Unassuming and
undemanding:
The EV2 boasts soft
suspension, featherlight steering and a
tight turning circle
keeps downtime risk low, which is exactly
the combination a fleet manager wants
to see.
The efficiency question
As an urban runabout, a pool car, a first
company car for a younger employee
or a perk car for someone who mostly
drives locally, the EV2 is close to ideal.
There is one meanness worth flagging
before you order, and it is a fleetrelevant one. Kia only offers a heat pump
on the top GT-Line S trim, and even then,
as a roughly £700 option.
A heat pump is the thing that protects
your efficiency and range in cold
weather, so its absence on the cheaper
cars means winter running will not
be quite as frugal as those headline
figures suggest.
If you are speccing for efficiency
across a fleet and your drivers do
winter miles, that omission is likely to be
genuinely irritating.
Beyond that, the choice is simple:
the entry-level Air is the value pick,
around £5,000 cheaper with almost
the same kit and smaller, more efficient
wheels; the GT-Line, which I drove,
adds the desirable image, and the
top GT-Line S, at £32,595, throws in
a premium stereo, a sunroof and a
360-degree camera that most fleet
buyers simply do not need.
The verdict
I came away from the launch genuinely
charmed. The EV2 GT-Line is spacious,
comfortable, beautifully judged for its
price, more enjoyable to drive than its
modest numbers suggest, and, in the
way that matters most to anyone running
one as a company car, astonishingly
cheap to tax and to run.
This car put a smile on my face on the
road, and an even bigger one when I sat
down and did the tax sums afterwards.
For a fleet, that combination is very
nearly the whole game.
