2026 Kia EV3 First Drive: Too Nice and Too Small for U.S.?

We’re a little hesitant to tell you how nice the new Kia EV3 is, because we’d hate to get your hopes up about what could end up being forbidden fruit. The only thing Kia’s U.S. arm can assure us of is that if it comes here, it won’t come before calendar year 2026. And who knows what the benchmark for small EVs will be by then?

We first introduced you to the three-row Kia EV9’s subcompact kid brother EV3 after its April fashion-week launch in Milan, and we got our first amuse-bouche drive of the car on a frozen lake in Sweden last February. Now we’ve driven the production car on its home turf in and around Seoul (deliveries are just beginning in Korea and Europe).

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What’s an EV3?

To recap our earlier coverage, the EV3 is based on the EV6 and EV9’s acclaimed E-GMP architecture but without those cars’ fast-charging 800-volt batteries. The EV3’s standard and long-range NMC battery options store 58.3 or 81.4 kW of energy, good for 270 or 376 miles of WLTP range (EPA numbers should drop by about 20 percent). Peak charging speeds scale down with battery size, to 130 kW for the big battery and 102 kW for the smaller one. Kia says each will take about a half-hour to charge from 10 to 80 percent. Oh, and Kia claims to be the first in this segment to offer an optional plug for powering a coffee maker at the campground or your fridge during a power outage.

How Big Is the EV3?

Size-wise, the EV3 measures within fractions of an inch of a 2024 Mini Countryman, except it’s 1.1 inch wider. That extra width and the mass of a big floor-mounted battery give the EV3 a well-planted, big-car feel. Sliding into cushy, heated, cooled, fully reclining seats behind the same 30-inch screen and 12-inch head-up display found in the EV9 further channels the Mini brand’s upscale-little-car vibe.

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How Does the EV3 Drive?

For now, all EV3s get front-wheel drive, featuring a 201-hp/209-lb-ft permanent-magnet motor. AWD models will follow, in GT-Line and full-on performance-minded GT guises that promise to drop the base model’s 7.5–7.7-second 0–62-mph time to below 7 and 6 seconds, respectively. Launch-timing and output specs for the AWD models aren’t out yet, but we’re told to expect the GT to send as much or more power to the rear wheels as it does to the fronts.

Acceleration feels front-drive Nissan Ariya–quick—brisk, but it won’t light your hair on fire. The wide track and beefy 215/50R-19 tires delivered sure-footed handling and absorbed what few bumps we encountered quite comfortably. Full disclosure: Seoul ranks high among the least fun places on earth to drive a car, thanks to its dense traffic and ubiquitous speed cameras enforcing low speed limits. We therefore had no real opportunity to wring this car out. But we were impressed by its ticket-avoidance tech: voice warnings, changing the white digital speed readout to amber within 5 kph over the limit, switching to red above that plus flashing the red ambient lighting. It even displays the car’s average speed over measured stretches on the nav screen and automatically drops a cruise control set speed in camera zones. If it comes here, we half expect Kia engineers to somehow leverage the forward collision radar to warn of speed traps.

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i-Pedal 3.0 & Smart Regenerative System

The EV3’s i-Pedal system (at last) works in reverse and remembers your preferred level of lift-throttle deceleration after a restart. It will also slow to a stop from all three levels of deceleration, as controlled by the steering-wheel paddles. Pulling and holding the right paddle for more than a second engages the Smart Regenerative System. This system formerly used regen to slow the car for curves and the like based solely on navigation data, but now it uses the full ADAS sensor suite to decelerate the car when approaching slower traffic, as well. We liked using it in thick traffic, though it didn’t always leave as generous a gap to a stopped car as we would have.

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Interior Fittings

EV3s are launching with three trim levels: Air, Earth, and GT Line. The top two look dressy, with cloth on the upper dash and door panels, tech-texture soft-touch plastics, ambient lighting, and optional splashes of color (we love the orange). The console lacks a stowage bin but offers a slide-out table/tray to hold food or a laptop while charging, and even the rear seats recline to 13 positions. A two-position cargo floor either mounts even with the folded seat backs and hatch opening or drops 5 inches lower to accommodate 16.2 cubic feet of cargo.

After two days in the EV3, we fret that it’s too fancy and too small to be both affordable and profitable in the U.S. While many of the amenities on our Earth and GT Line test cars will be optional—as will the moonroof, power liftgate, Harman Kardon audio, park assist, 19-inch wheels, etc.—the main screen, and the soft-touch sustainable interior materials throughout will surely be standard on this big-battery EV, shaving profits to razor thin at best.

How Much, and How Likely?

Profitability will be particularly iffy at the $35,000 base price Kia is targeting (for the record, the entry-level base prices in Korea, England, and Germany convert to $30K, $35K, and $43K, with differing standard equipment levels). Complicating matters is the notion that North American assembly is crucial in order to qualify for Federal tax credits, and Kia’s Georgia plant is currently full, producing 350,000 Telluride, Sorento, Sportage, and EV9 SUVs on three shifts, while its Pesquería, Mexico, plant supplies B- and C-segment cars to Central and South America. Sure, the EV9 is an E-GMP architecture, but every lower-margin EV3 would displace a more profitable EV9 in a full plant. And finally, there’s the issue of Kia already offering a nice, compact, affordable E-crossover: the Niro EV, which was nicely revamped for 2023. So while we’d love to see an affordable EV as nice as this one offered in America, we’re not holding our breath.