2015 Kia K900 – Review and Test Drive
Korea Unleashes a Stately Luxury Sedan on the U.S. Market
DRIVING THE 2015 KIA K900
This is one quick Kia, something everyone who drove the K900 during its stay with us immediately noticed. It moves from a standstill to 60 mph (96 km/h) in 5.5 seconds. In standard mode, it isn’t particularly engaging but switch to Sport (normal and Eco modes are also available) and the car gains some personality. The switch to Sport alters the steering, throttle response, shift action, and damper settings, resulting in a somewhat more responsive performance.
Even in Sport mode, the cabin remains completely silent. Kia’s engineers did a competent job of keeping passengers fully isolated from the world at large.
However, there is noise. We had the Kia during a rainy week and found out that the lane-departure warning system and rain didn’t particularly get along. The warning system alerts the driver to the possibility that the car is moving out of its lane by monitoring the lane markings with a camera. During moderate downpours, the lane-departure warning system beeped continually despite the car being perfectly centered in the lane.
While the K900 has all the typical high-tech wizardry one would find in a BMW, Lexus, or Mercedes-Benz, the implementation is definitely far less refined.
The rear-view camera did not fare any better in the rain, when it became useless. Adding to the litany of less than polished features was the blind-spot detection system, which, in the rain, alerted me to more highway dividers than any other car I’ve ever driven with such systems.
Bluetooth streaming was also a bit problematic. It took a while for my iPhone to pair to the car, and the volume had to be significantly boosted in order to hear what was streaming (when compared to using it with the Lightning cable, where volume was normal). This wouldn’t have been a significant issue except that the car would blast whatever station had been left on the radio at a high volume until the pairing process had finished.
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