2022 Kia Carnival 3.5 Liter V6 Powered Minivan
The new Kia Carnival arrives, is this Kia Carnival the best budget minivan of all time? Let's see.
The Carnival’s styling is interesting, and the longer I looked at it, the more I came to like it. It doesn’t exactly look like a minivan. Give it some bigger wheels and a bit more ride height, and it begins to look a lot like a crossover. Specifically, as Autoblog West Coast Editor James Riswick pointed out, it really resembles a Chevy Traverse. Kia does, after all, mostly refrain from using the word “minivan” to describe the Carnival, instead referring to it officially as an MPV, or multi-purpose vehicle (which, coming full circle, is a term many markets have used for years in lieu of the word “minivan”).
And the Carnival definitely looks unlike the competition. The grille on our SX Prestige tester was made up of blocky chunks of material surrounded by a mesh of negative space. The hood, with its pair of sculpted lines and the first use of the new Kia logo, terminates in a horizontal line above the grille. That line extends above the headlights, and a character line brings it rearward to the horizontal rear lighting. Blacked-out A-, B- and D-pillars contrast with the chunky chrome C-pillar with its vanishing-diamond texture in this trim level. The shiny bumper valences and side skirts are a nice touch, and our tester’s black wheels completed the sporty appearance.
But the lowered stance and sliding doors are indicators that the Carnival is indeed a minivan, just like the Sedona it replaces. It rides much closer to the ground than that Traverse we compared it to above, which translates to easier ingress/egress, easier loading, and a more carlike ride. Of particular note is the cut line for the sliding doors, which lines up with that character line that extends rearward from below the hood. “Rather than shy away from the cut line for the doors, our designers embraced it,” said Joseph Choi, advanced project planning and strategy manager at Kia. We still wish Kia would have committed further to distancing from the minivan look and tucked this line away somewhere less conspicuous.
The Carnival is surprisingly good to drive. I greatly appreciated the Toyota Sienna’s ability to provide a car-like experience from behind the wheel, and the Carnival is similar. It steers confidently, with a nice weight building up in the tiller through corners. The suspension is slightly on the taut side, giving a good feel of the road, with the downside of transmitting more road noise into the cabin. It doesn’t hold up as well as the Sienna when driven aggressively through corners, where body roll and understeer come into play, but who cares? It’s a minivan.
Like an increasing number of Hyundai and Kia vehicles, the Carnival offers a sweet bundle of driver assistance features meant to decrease stress and increase safety. Standard in the base LX trim ($33,275) are items including lane-keeping and -following assist, blind-spot monitoring, forward collision avoidance, and rear cross-traffic alert. EX ($38,775) and higher trim levels get navigation-based adaptive cruise control that can lower vehicle speeds ahead of upcoming curves, as well as Highway Driving Assist to help steer the minivan on well-marked highways with little to no input on the part of the driver. The SX Prestige is the only trim to get the slick blind-spot cameras that pop a video feed onto the digital gauges when you use the turn signal. It all works quite well making for smooth, easy driving even in heavy, stop-and-go traffic.