| Road Test Kia Magentis 2.0 CRDi GS |
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Amiable Saloon
Manufacturers were very good at this sort of thing back then. The Ford Mondeo, Nissan Primera, Toyota Carina, Vauxhall Cavalier and so on of that period were not particularly interesting; in fact, you could lump them all under the title of "boring cars", but they were good boring cars - unpretentious, useful, and in most cases rather nice to drive. The Magentis is like that. It has no outstanding features whatever, though it does have several good ones. It has a pleasing, if undramatic, shape, and for its overall size it's quite spacious inside. The amount of room for rear passengers, in particular, is very impressive, and a luggage capacity of 420 litres is decent enough for the class, though some potential UK customers will probably be put off by the fact that it's a saloon rather than a hatch.
It also has a lightness of touch which most of the opposition has lost. Back in 1993 you could have a lot of fun with the handling of a Cavalier, say, or a Mondeo, whose modern equivalents feel distinctly more stodgy (even more so in the case of the Primera, which was transformed from a marvel of cornering poise to a bar of soap in less than a decade). Nowadays only the Mazda6 continues to demonstrate that a car of this type can still offer driving kicks.
One of the few things about the Magentis - in the form tested here, at least - that can't be compared with anything found on an early 90s car is the 138bhp two-litre CRDi turbo diesel engine, introduced to make the car more appealing to fleet customers in particular. It's found in every other Kia apart from the Picanto and works well in all of them, and it does so here too, producing decent performance along with the potential for 47mpg economy. There's a two-litre petrol too, and a 2.7-litre V6, but the diesel has to be the unit of choice. |
The second-generation Magentis isn't as good as the Mazda, and like some other Kias it has a tendency to front-end bounciness which can make it feel like an over-driven MPV. In fact it shares the same platform as the Carens MPV - and not, as before, the Hyundai Sonata - but that shouldn't have anything to do with the bouncing, which eventually limits both the ride quality and the handling ability. Before you've reached that point, though, it can be driven with a light touch, allowing itself to be fed into corners with less effort than most of the opposition.
