Price as tested: €12,595.
In brief: Kia ups the quality, safety and equipment bar with the new Picanto. Good looking and sweet to drive too.
Seven years doesn’t seem like an especially long time, yet it has become a virtual cliché to point out just how far Kia has come in that span of years. Why seven? Why not a decade? Simple, because it was seven years ago that the first generation Picanto was launched and we all got an inkling that Kia could actually make a decent car.
That first Picanto was hardly earth-shattering, but it was a shining beacon in amongst the low-cost dreck that Kia was peddling at the time. It had a pleasant, nicely-appointed cabin, a sweet-revving little 1.0-litre engine and a chassis that actually seemed to enjoy being chucked about. As a city nipper, it was nigh-on perfect and when Kia’s seven-year warranty kicked in, buying one became something of a no-brainer.
So, what of the 2011 Picanto? Can it stand out in amongst the horde of very decent (and occasionally outstanding) Kias that now populate the Korean maker’s range?
Well, the simple fact is that it can’t possibly stand out like the original simply because Kia no longer makes dreck, and in the shape of the Cee’d and Sportage makes some genuinely excellent cars.
Still, stylistically, Kia (under the guidance of design director Peter Schreyer) has done much to make the new Picanto stand out in a given motoring crowd. Quite apart from the, ahem, ‘jaunty’ colour options (powder blue and banana yellow among them), the Picanto looks much more chiseled and handsome than before. The cats-bum grille of old has gone, replaced by a jutting Thunderbirds puppet jaw of a front bumper, that distinctive ‘Tiger Mouth’ grille and a sense of being well proportioned and balanced – not always a given on a tall, narrow city car.
Inside, there is a surprising amount of room, especially in the back where six footers can at the very least squeeze in for short hops without complaint. Up front, the fascia and instruments look and feel of the highest quality, while the two-spoke steering wheel with its funky faux-aluminium inserts, feels just right in your palms.
The 200-litre boot is a bit on the small side though. It’ll just about take a decent shopping trip, but kids buggies and bigger bags are going to be a squeeze at best, and possibly not possible.
We’ve become used to Kia offering better than decent standard equipment lists, but the Picanto really takes the biscuit. OK, so the basic LX mdoel’s entry price of €11,495 may look a touch high compared to some versions of the Fiat Panda or Nissan Pixo, but then the Picanto comes stuffed to the gills with spec, including side and curtain airbags, ESP, remote central locking and a trip computer.
Upgrade to the €12,595 EX model we tested and it feels practically Rolls-Royce-esque by city car standards. Air conditioning, iPod connection, all-round electric windows, electric folding wing mirrors and a Bluetooth phone hook-up. Crikey.
All of which would be worth three fifths of damn all if the Picanto felt cheap or was nasty to drive, but it just isn’t.
OK, so with 69bhp from 998cc, the little three-pot engine isn’t going to win any rice pudding skin pulling contests, but it rasps and whirrs away happily to itself and as long as you stir the five speed gearbox regularly (which moves with a positive, chunky feeling across its gate) then you won’t be left feeling too sluggish. Extra weight (especially in the form of well-fed motoring journalists) blunts performance noticably, but that’s the price you pay for 99g/km Co2 emissions (which should keep the Picanto in the lowest tax band whatever budgetary changes Obergruppenfurher Noonan has planned) and claimed 4.2-litres per 100km fuel economy. That economy will take a serious hit if you stretch the Picanto’s legs too much or too often on the motorway, but keep it around town (why no stop-start, incidentally?) and you should be able to get close to that kind of figure.
And while it’s no Lotus, the littlest Kia certainly doesn’t disgrace itself in the handling stakes. The steering is well weighted and communicative, while front end grip feels especially sticky and well sorted. It flicks and turns with agility and the sensation that you’ll be able to take advantage of pretty much any gap that opens up in traffic, but the tall roof and titchy length mean that the ride quality isn’t what it could be; big bumps are well and truly felt and shorter, sharper shocks aren’t sufficiently well ironed out. Good, but not great in that department.
It’s actually kind of hard to tell how good the Picanto is. Certainly, it’s at least as good as our class favourite, the Fiat Panda, and way ahead of Ford’s awful Ka. It’s also better looking, better equipped and more economical than its cousin, the Hyundai i10, which is also slightly more expensive. And it feels much more modern (as it should) than the likes of the Toyota Aygo or Peugeot 107. So it’s good then, very good indeed.
But is it just us, or does that fact that the rest of the Kia range is now also every bit as good somehow take the shine off the Picanto’s excellence? Suddenly, we’ve become used to Kia giving us terrific cars. The fact that the Picanto lives precisely up to that expectation is the best form of faint praise we can think of.
Facts & Figures
Kia Picanto 1.0 EX
Price: €12,595
Price range: €11,495 to €12,595
Capacity: 998cc
Power: 69bhp
Torque: 95Nm
Top speed: 153kmh
0-100kmh: 14.4sec
Economy: 4.2l-100km (65mpg)
CO2 emissions: 99g/km
Road Tax Band: A €104
Euro NCAP rating: Not yet tested
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