New Kia Sportage facelift driven: bold design, smarter cabin and better hybrids

Kia's Sportage has always set quite the benchmark when it comes to a "safe bet" in the world of family SUVs. In fact, whenever someone asks me for car buying advice, I usually interrupt them with "Kia Sportage", without them even needing to tell me their budget requirements. Throughout every generation, they've just been consistently good. And even the older ones still are.

That said, we're on the fifth generation now, and this is the new facelifted model. And as facelifts go, it's hardly a "safe bet", is it?

Kia now has a fairly unified design direction, built around the "Opposites United" philosophy, and the Sportage's take on this family snout borrows heavily from the electric SUVs, with a huge grille and daytime running lights that seem to have been pushed outwards so far they're pretty much mounted to the side rather than the front.

I'm all for cohesive brand styling, but this one's going to take some getting used to. Let's put it in the "grower" file for now, and hope it starts to blend in with its inevitable ubiquity. It is, after all, Kia's best-selling model.

The styling of the rear of the newcomer feels far more sober. In fact, it's very attractive from the rear-quarter view, and it looks significantly more modern than the previous iteration.

The facelift also brings new drivetrains, with a a 1.6-litre petrol, or a new and improved full hybrid with 235bhp. There’s also an improved all-wheel drive plug-in hybrid on its way, which will be a welcome addition.

Kia's plunged a bit of effort into the handling, too, with a complicated torque vectoring system. If that makes it sound like a Porsche, it's not. It's an SUV, but it handles better than it strictly needs to.

There's a new seven-speed DCT gearbox, new safety features, a new regeneration system, and even more standard kit than before, it's more efficient than its predecessor, but we haven't got to the biggest alteration yet... The interior.

Kia's designers have created a comfortable, smart, and refreshingly functional cabin for this facelift - with the unusual two-spoke steering wheel being the only fairly whacky design feature, and everything else just working well, and ergonomically clever.

There's a wrap-around screen on all but the base spec models, which is a big improvement over the older versions, and a really handy panel of capacitive "buttons" for the climate control.

There are clever storage solutions, plenty of USB-C sockets, and space is as generous as it's ever been in the front and rear, with a 591-litre boot in the petrol variant and a 587-litre boot in the hybrid. Legend has it the plug-in hybrid boot will be smaller again, but not significantly.

While on the interior it's important to mention that Kia has maintained its position of installing genuinely annoying safety warnings. Thankfully, there are shortcut buttons that take you to a page on the infotainment screen that will give you temporary relief, but it's not ideal.

It's also worth mentioning that Kia is by no means the worst offender in this modern motoring scourge, but it's irritating enough to comment on.

That aside, the new drivetrain offers even better fuel economy, emissions are down, prices haven't gone silly, finance deals are genuinely appealing, and you still get a seven-year warranty.

So in just about every way possible, the Sportage has been improved. Would I still recommend it to my friends? Of course I would.

But I'd probably show them a picture of the back, first.