Kia Sportage SUV - Reliability & safety

Kia’s huge seven-year warranty has gained plenty of praise since its introduction but it’s likely that you won’t need to use it very often. Both the brand and the outgoing Sportage are loved by owners, so the new Sportage will need to keep up the good work.

Kia Sportage reliability

In our 2022 Driver Power owner satisfaction survey, the last-generation Kia Sportage finished sixth in our list of the top 75 cars, with everything except the engine and its fuel consumption praised. The newly available hybrid models should fix that, while we’d expect the new infotainment system to score highly.

Kia, meanwhile, came third out of 29 manufacturers, with only Tesla and Porsche ahead of it. While a slightly higher-than-average proportion of owners reported a fault in the first year (20.4%), Kia still got a top-10 score for reliability, suggesting that faults were most likely to be minor glitches. In fact, all its scores were in the top 10.

Safety

When crash-tested by Euro NCAP, the Kia Sportage also received an impressive five-star score. The larger Kia Sorento scored the maximum five-star rating in 2020, while the Sportage’s closely related Hyundai Tucson cousin also scored five stars in 2021. Autonomous emergency braking and lane-follow assist are among the safety features fitted as standard, along with intelligent speed-limit assistance and hill-hold.

For ‘3’ models equipped with an automatic gearbox, adaptive cruise control and highway driving assist are also fitted, while top-spec cars increase the tech count with blind-spot monitoring, a 360-degree camera and parking collision avoidance.