Kia Soul Review

Kia Soul+ Review Hi, I'm Kelsey Mays for cars.com. This is the all new Kia Soul. The Soul is Kia’s bid to unseat Toyota’s Scion Brand for kind of cool hip cars for younger people. On a 1 to 10 scale, the boxy Scion XP, maybe a 6, the Nissan Cube, another competitor maybe a 6.5. So how does the Soul lineup? Let's take a look. The Cube and XP have more space agent interiors with the sort of boxier dashboards. The Soul’s actually looks like regular cars for some people that might be a really good thing. Roominess might not be as much as you get in either of those cars because they kind of open up their center console area here a little bit more. So there's more space for your knees to kind of spill out. I've got plenty of headroom even with the highly adjustable driver seat all the way up. And this car has a sunroof which lowers headroom a little bit. Legroom, it could be a little bit more. I've got the driver seat all the way back. A couple cool things, the glove compartment is absolutely huge. It goes way back in there. It’s kind of nice. The dashboard plastics have this sort of mat finished on them. Even though they are hard cheaper plastics, it doesn’t look that way at first it’s kind of a nice thing. Neither do the gauges, there are these back lit gauges, black and white, very business like. A couple of things that don’t work so well, the sunglass holder sort of area here above the radio controls. I have some trouble opening it. Other editors did as well. This over at grab handles have been dumped for years and years and years in most cars and in the Soul, they still sort of just don’t --. Part of the optional speakers upgrade package is mood lights in the door speakers. They actually go in there and you can set them to pulsate with the music that you're playing. It works better with whatever your kids are listening to these days. Stuff with really heavy bass beats, if you put in real music, it doesn’t work so well. I don’t know how I feel about that. Driving experience is pretty pedestrian. Definitely not as much passing power as the XB but Kia is promising 30 to 31 miles per galloon on the highway. It is better than the Scion gets. Maybe not as good as Nissan says, the Cube will get. I can't judge these sort of things too harshly because the Soul starts just over $13,000.00 that comes with standard features like power windows and door locks, iPod integration with the stereo, AC, annual lock breaks and electronic stability system. So the Soul definitely has value. Isn't this cool? Well, kind of and some of ways it is. If you try to make monthly payments in this economy, maybe value is the new cool dude. For more car related news, go to cars.com or our blog, kickingtires.net.