2016 Kia Carnival Review | Auto Expert John Cadogan

You’ve been blessed with the gift that is children. You’ve committed your genes to the next generation, and now you need a car that will do everything. It has to be compatible with Bunnings and camping and shopping and your kids and their friends and her parents, and all the possible permutations of the 21st-Century menagerie.

You’re stuck, because what you want and what you need are impossibly conflicted. What you want is a seven-seat SUV (everyone does, apparently). But what you need is a people mover - you know: a ‘people mover’ (the automotive equivalent of a discount vasectomy).

But it doesn’t have to be this way. You know, I’ve test-driven this Kia Carnival Platinum diesel for a week, and I came to love this vehicle. There are several reasons why this vehicle is a more practical and compelling choice for actually moving people than any seven-seat SUV.

Let’s get the basics out of the way first. The Carnival is huge. The front end and the back end are often in different postcodes. It’s 5.1 metres long - and change. Carnival is longer than a standard 7-Series BMW, and that’s where the comparison ends, obviously, but it’s just a frag shorter than a long-wheelbase 7-Series, like a 740Li.

I picked up a Sorento when I finished my week-long Carnival evaluation drive. The Sorento felt positively compact. Svelte. Sporty. Anorexic. I never thought I would say that.

Carnival is huge and cavernous. The wheelbase is just over three metres. That’s a foot longer than many SUVs. The back end can’t even see the front end most days - the horizon being often in the way.

It’s frigging huge. And it’s versatile. Bigger and more versatile than Honda Odyssey, its closest competitor in the people mover domain. Carnival is the top-seller among people movers, comfortably in front of Odyssey in second spot. Daylight to everything else. So it’s a big fish in a pretty small ocean. People movers are, generally, not all that popular.

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