Here's Why the 2020 Kia Soul Is My Favorite Small Car

this is the 2020 Kia Soul and it is one of my favorite compact cars on the market maybe my very favorite the compact car market mainly consists of boring old regular sedans you have this and this and this and this and you can barely even tell them apart you can easily tell apart to the Kia Soul which is all new fully redesigned for the 2020 model year today I'm going to review it first a brief overview now the Kia Soul first came out for the 2010 model year which is the very same year that Kia launched the forte compact sedan and the thinking at the time was the forte would be the popular small Kia to take on all the other popular compact sedans and the soul would be the funky weird one and it would rival cars like the Nissan Cube and the Scion xB and the Honda Element but that's not quite what happened instead the soul took off in popularity vastly outselling the Forte like three to one and the Honda Element the Nissan Cube and the Scion xB have all been canceled but the soul shows no signs of slowing down the soul is all new and totally redesigned for the 2020 model year and this is the third generation of the soul although it keeps the same charm and the same basic shape as the original now two engines are offered the base engine has 147 horsepower or you can upgrade to a more powerful engine with 201 horsepower like this Seoul has Kia says an electric version is on the way as for base pricing it's around $1000 more expensive to start than the outgoing sole meaning the base price is around eighteen thousand five hundred dollars with shipping so today I'm gonna take you on a tour of the Seoul and I'm gonna show you all of the quirks and features of the quirky new Kia Soul then I'm gonna get it out on the road and drive it and then I'm going to give it a dug store and for more of my thoughts on the SOL click the link below to visit autotrader.com slash oversteer where I've also rounded up a list of the coolest old hatchbacks currently listed for sale on auto trade now I'm going to start the quicksand features on the inside of the soul and I'm going to start with the heads up and display which is kind of unusual now a lot of cars has heads-up displays they project certain vital information on to the windshield while you're driving so you see it in front of you the soul doesn't a little differently it doesn't have a heads-up display until you press this little button to the left of the steering wheel and then one automatically whirs itself up behind the gauge cluster you can hear it going and then it is a heads-up display it's not projected onto the windshield instead it's projected on to this little clear piece that has come up behind the gauge cluster but it works relatively the same it's sort of a budget heads-up display next time by far the best quirk of the new soul is the sound mood lamp all right you can access this by going into the infotainment system you can turn the sound mood lamp and then you can configure this unusual trim on the door panel to light up to the beat of your music and it will play along with the music in six separate categories you have hey yo party time-traveling romance midnight City and cafe and I absolutely love how they're displayed in the infotainment system they're all just side profiles of the Kia Soul all containing images of what they're named for so anyway you pick whichever mood you want and then the lights in the door panel will light up to the beat of your music depending on which mood you've selected so maybe party time is a little crazier and romance is a little bit more calm and romantic now personally I can't seem to get this to work at least during the daytime I cut my hands over it to try to make it dark and I just can't seem to get these mood lights to actually turn on and bounce to my music but I'm gonna try it at night and we'll see if that works and yes it does work check this out as the music plays the mood lighting brightens and dim is based on the beat of the music which is just wonderfully quirky and weird as it turns out it doesn't matter which mood setting you choose the mood lighting always brightens and dims with the music the same amount so the mood setting only really configures the color of the lighting one other interesting item the moon lighting in the top half of the door panels turns off when you're actually in motion so it doesn't distract you while you're driving it turns back on when you've come to a stop even if you're just sitting at a traffic light one other thing you don't have to choose a mood you can also choose a solid color that will pulse with the beat of the music naturally all of these colors have unusual and weird names my personal favorites are violet cloud and peaceful forest which I assume are just purple and green next up speaking of the sound system another funky item in this car if speakers and all the usual places like the door panels as you saw but this car also has speakers next to the climate control vents on either side of the dashboard there's one to the left of the steering wheel there's one all the way over on the passenger side just a little extra speaker location for more funkiness in the soul another weird item in the soul this time in the center console next to the gear lever you have the heated seat buttons and they are absolutely massive these are the largest heated seat buttons I've ever seen in fact the heated seat button is larger than the engines start/stop button it actually turns the vehicle on or off I guess they wanted heated seats to be a really important and easily pressable feature in this car now with that said aside from those things I just mentioned that this interior isn't really all that quirky which is kind of disappointing to me this is a quirky car with a quirky look and there's always been a tricky marketing campaign around and I like the sound mood lamp but otherwise things in here are fairly typical of a compact car I was kind of hoping the Kia Soul would have more funky weird quirks and features in fact Kia has even gotten rid of one of my favorite things in the soul which was its trim level names it wasn't just LX and EX and boring stuff instead the SOL trims were like exclamation point and plus sign and of course this drove the car journalists crazy like how do we call it the soul exclamation point and then it screws up the syntax of the settings and maybe that's why they changed it but now it has boring traditional trim levels like LX and the XG s GT and none of that stuff is quite as unusual I want a quirky car and this doesn't go quite quirky enough for me or at least that's true for the interior but it isn't quite true for the exterior because on the outside this soul is just as funky and weird as it's always been maybe even weirder and there's no better example of that than back here now you've heard of light bars that go across the back of the car they've become a popular industry trend well the soul has a light circle that basically starts here and goes all the way around the entire tailgate now unfortunately not all of that lights up only the sides do and obviously the third brake light in the middle this part doesn't and the whole circle around doesn't but nonetheless even when just the taillights are on this car has a very distinctive rear brake light pattern back here that makes it look more funky and weird and special than your typical boring compact car I also love this piece here this like floating body panel on the tailgate it's almost like how did this get here and why is it here and it contributes to the souls funky weird look now I've already heard some complaints about the souls rear end design from supposed car enthusiasts who don't like the tail light circle or this floating body colored piece of course these are the same people who complain cars today are too boring and then someone does something like this and it's cars today are too ugly and there's just no way to please these idiots but if you're going with an open mind and you expect kind of a funky quirky thing from the soul that's what you get back here and another interesting piece of design on the souls if the soul has adopted the floating roof trend that is now very popular in the car industry basically extending the window line all the way to the rear end of the tailgate and making it look like the roof is floating above everything you can see Kia did it by putting this panel here that says soul and that separates visually the bottom half of the car from the roof and it gives it sort of that floating roof look now as I look at this and I see this car's name printed here soul I'm gonna have something interesting I've considered about this car you know kia is a south korean car company and South Korea's capital largest city is Seoul spelled SEO UL the car is soul spelled like Seoul sou L is that coincidence or did they name the car after the city and they wanted it to be sort of an interesting play on words this soul from soul I'm not really sure but I've always wondered about that and next up we move on to the front of the new soul for more funkiness and specifically the fact that in between the headlights in most cars you have a grille in between the headlights in this car you have a light bar this car doesn't just have a light bar and back it has a light bar across the front very disappointingly it doesn't light up only the sides of the actual headlight clusters light up when you turn on the running lights or the headlights I really wish this whole front light bar lit up but it still has a cool and funky look to it that you expect from the Kia Soul now the grille as a result of not being here has been pushed down here and so now it's basically in the bumper and the grille of this car is obviously rather weird it's large it looks like a pouty lower lip coming off the front of this car and it's filled with all these why's you can see this little wide pattern throughout the girl yyy basically everywhere you look in front it is an odd front-end design for an odd vehicle and next I'm moving back to the inside of the solo and move on to the back seats which are shockingly roomy for a compact car I have the driver seat position where I would sit and I'm six foot four and you can see I actually fit back here as a backseat passenger my knees are right up against the seat but nonetheless I'm back here and I have at least three or four inches of headroom which is way more than I can say in virtually any other compact card is a surprisingly roomy interior back here and the back seat of this car also has the same quirky door panel trim for the sound mood lamp implying that if I could get it dark enough to actually see the sound mood lamp you would see it bouncing along to the beat of the music just like it does in front one thing in the rear of this car does not have is a little storage pocket on the back of the driver seat you have one on the back of the passenger seat but they decided to cheap out and not put one on the back of the driver seat which is an interesting cost-cutting move in a vehicle where the interior lights bounce along to the music with six different mood options now we're gonna give them the midnight City mood but we're not gonna give them a storage pocket back next we move on to the cargo area of the soul which frankly is one of my very favorite things about it mostly because this is the main thing that separates this car from something like a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla yeah you can get one of those and they're great cars and they'll be fine but if you get one of these not only do you have a car that's more distinctive and more funky but it's also more practical so it's beneficial in a bunch of ways I mean if you put down the seats this cargo area is massive and because of this car sort of boxy design in back you can fill up the cargo area with TVs and tables and you could probably move your whole apartment in one of these which is a lot more than you can say for the typical traditional old-fashioned compact sedans not only are they not as distinctive they're not as practical in next I'm moving back to the front seat of the soul because I want to talk technology and first I want to say just a general word about this cars technology it's really impressive in the middle you have a giant and very responsive center touch screen that has a zillion different functions including navigation satellite radio basically everything you could ask for and then there's the long list of safety technology I already showed you the heads-up display but you also get blind spot monitoring forward collision automatic braking this car even has radar cruise control so little slow down and speed up based on the speed of traffic ahead of you this thing is loaded up with all of the gadgets and features that sometimes you don't even get in luxury cars the result of that is that pricing for this version is well above the $18,500 base price figure twenty two to twenty four thousand dollars if you want all this tech in about twenty eight thousand if you want all this tech and the powerful 201 horsepower turbo four-cylinder like this soul has now some of these technology features are a little weird and quirky and so I'm going to show them to you and I'm to start in the gauge cluster with what happens when you turn on the car it goes through a system check and it shows that by showing the car drive through like this invisible force field that I guess is checking out all the systems I also have to admit that I think it's kind of charming what happens when you turn off the sole namely it plays a little goodbye song take a listen [Music] now I've made fun of other Hyundai and Kia models for this ridiculous sound before and you can turn off you can go into the gauge cluster screen and actually turn off the sound if you want to but I must admit that I kind of like it I find it to be a little charming you turn off the car and it plays like a little goodbye tone like your own personal soundtrack as you're leaving your soul now next up into the infotainment system and I've covered this infotainment system in reviews of the kia stinger and the Kia k900 which have a link in the description below but I still found a couple of interesting quirks in here starting with the fact that you can check the Doppler radar map in this infotainment system you clicked on you can see where there are rain clouds and snow clouds although if you do that you'll notice the map they give you you can only scroll up and down like it's a website you can't actually go side to side what if I want to know what the weather looks like over there well too bad you can't do that you have that option now with that setting you can look at different weather for different cities if you go into weather it will show this city where you're currently in but you can change the city and the first option is it gives you a list of different cities within your state but then you can click on change state and you can see a list of all the different states you can change to for example the state of Alberta one of my favorite states or the state of the District of Columbia or if you keep scrolling they have the state of Manitoba so kia has done a really comprehensive job of getting all of the United States of America all 65-67 US states are represented in here excellent fantastic infotainment next up here's a piece of my new show that I found interesting in the infotainment system if you go into advanced settings this infotainment system lets you configure what happens to the tuner knob when you have the navigation map showing so you can choose whether you want it to still be a tuner knob or whether you want it to turn into a zoom function for the navigation map it's incredible that that's configurable that they even thought of that most automakers would just choose one of those things and give it to you that way or not even considered that they should change the function of the tuner not in this car you can choose what that tuner knob does finally the other interesting thing I want to discuss in here is the owner's manual you pull the owner's manual out the first thing you'll notice is there's this little warning that comes with all kia souls equipped to the dual clutch transmission as this car has explaining how a dual clutch works and how it's a little different from a standard automatic now my personal favorite thing on here is there's an explanation of all the transmission warning lights for example transmission temperature is high stop the car transmission is hot park the car and then there's another one transmission is cooling remain parked for zero-zero minutes in order to cool down the transmission kia tells you right here you have to park the car for 0-0 minutes or else it simply will not cool down okay now next we move on to the owner's manual which is unusually thick and long and as I was looking through here I started to figure out why because kia really wants to protect themselves for example on page four incredibly long - 138 it says electric shock do not put a finger or a foreign object into a power outlet or touch with a wet hand you may get an electric shock Thank You Kia that's something I learned when I was six they felt it was necessary to include the owner's manual for a vehicle can you imagine the kind of idiots who buy cars that they have to put these kind of warnings in the owners manual just to prevent these people from suing them later oh you didn't tell me I can't stick a pen and do an electrical out laughs oh and I guess he is really worried about the American market and all of its lawsuits and so that's a tour of the 2020 Kia Soul and now it's time to get it out on the road and drive it all right driving the Kia Soul really love this car and I have ever since it came in on and I mostly love it it's a good car and I've explained part of why and I'll explain more on this drive but most of the reason I love it is it's just proof but you don't have to do the same boring thing that every other car company does you couldn't think outside the box and compass up a little weird and sometimes it's a huge success so what do I think about the driving experiences well one thing I don't agree with the fact that kia classifies this vehicle as a crossover it is tall taller than some true crossovers but it doesn't have all wheel drive and it does not much ground clearance and you don't really sit up all that high it feels to me more like sort of a compact carnage bag but obviously crossovers are kind of what sells these days and so that's why kia calls at that one thing I am impressed with in this car is the powertrain um most economy cars compact cars are slow sluggish and I suspect that the base engine in this car with only 147 horsepower probably does feel pretty lethargic a lot of the time but this engine 201 horsepower this thing moves now it takes a while for the transmission to gear down but it actually called really kind of quick surprisingly so and then the shifts are pretty smooth to do a clutch it's actually an impressively quick vehicle yeah one thing I do want to mention this car is interior noise there's actually not all that much interior noise generally speaking on the highway here you hear some wind rush I think more than I'm accustomed to even another compact cars you don't need a lot of tire noise where you do hear noise though is under hard acceleration you really push it and you can really kind of hear the engine whine is it gears down and goes and accelerates a radar cruise control system this car is very good it brings the car all the way to a stop however it does not hold it there so if you're driving and heavy traffic bumper-to-bumper stop traffic that the cruise system will bring it down to zero but then it turns off in the car starts idling forward like a traditional automatic so you can't really rely on it to do all of the foot work for you if you're in really heavy traffic in terms of handling steering you know it feels like a compact car like you know entry-level small crossover type vehicle steering is light and fake but I mean you know that's fine that's what this vehicle is and I always get annoyed when car journal is only well I was driving a Prius and the steering is like well it's Prius owners one ultimately this the latest version of the soul all it does is modernize as a car you know a lot of people already like that I already liked it makes the styling a little crisper it provides slightly better technology and this car is still charming it's still cool it's still quirky I do wish the interior was a little funkier and weirder but other than that I just think this is an excellent car and the Honda Civic is a really really great small compact car a great sedan it's a really good car and probably the gold standard of this segment but I think for people who are just sick of all my friends my other friends my other friends got on in lunch why they all like the same they lose been parking lots well this is the antidote this is the compact car that is actually fun and exciting and cool and so that's the new 2020 Kia Soul a car that surprised everyone with its popularity yes the Honda Civic is also an excellent compact car if you want the regular stuff a sedan or maybe a coupe but if you want something that's a little weirder a little funkier and a lot more practical thanks to the huge cargo area the soul is your ticket and now with the redesign it's better than ever and now it's time to give the soul a dug score starting with the weekend categories and styling the soul is cool and weird and distinctive but not beautiful it gets a 6 out of 10 acceleration somehow it does 0 to 60 in like 6.3 seconds and it gets a 3 out of this thing is quicker than yes - st handling though is on the average for this segment it gets a three out of ten fun factor could be higher if kia took more risks on the inside but some pulsing interior lights isn't enough to bump it up too much and it gets a three out of ten finally cool factor and this is cooler than most other stuff in this segment and it gets a four out of ten for a total weekend score of 19 out of 50 next up are the daily categories and features this is well equipped with some cool stuff but also a bit low on other items there's no panoramic sunroof no cooled seats no top-down camera and it gets a 6 out of 10 Comfort is average for the segment and it gets a 5 out of 10 quality is high the interior is surprisingly nice for this class but the real benefit is kia is excellent warranty and it earns a 7 out of 10 practicality is excellent given the huge cargo area it gets an 8 out of 10 finally value and the one that I reviewed with the big engine is just too expensive at more than $28,000 if you want performance you'll get a Fiesta ST or a Veloster and both of which are way more engaging than the SOL for similar money the best buy in the SOL lineup is an e X model on the low to mid $20,000 range which has all this tech but the smaller engine which is what most buyers will want anyway still this gets a 7 out of 10 though a mid-level model would gain a point or two anyway add it all up in the dug score is 52 out of 100 I don't test many small cars like this but here it is next to some sort of rivals it perfectly ties the Chevy bolt although the bolt is very different since it's an electric car but overall the soul is great and I highly recommend the newest version [Music]

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 1,868,676

Rating: 4.7544913 out of 5

Keywords: kia soul review, 2020 kia soul review, soul review, soul, kia soul, 2020 kia soul, 2020 soul review, 2020 soul, new kia soul, new kia soul review, 2019 kia soul, doug demuro, de muro, doug de muro

Id: 2sXPNVpQe98

Length: 22min 39sec (1359 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/papa_pussy]

If I had a dollar for every time Doug said he'd link another video in the description but actually didn't I'd probably have enough money to buy his Ford GT.

Edit: I can't spell

[u/[deleted]]

/u/Doug-DeMuro There's a bit of confusion here. You mentioned that most drivers will likely buy the smaller engine. The soul is set up weird. The larger engine (2.0na) is the base engine. The smaller engine (1.6T) is the hotter / higher up trim.

[u/Zcypot]

I got the first gen base model with a 6-speed. That car was FUN!!! near 40mpg too. I regret selling it, i should have kept it as a daily. I dont like any other kia.

[u/BimmerJustin]

Kia Soul: same styling score as a rolls royce phantom

[u/inexplorata]

"There's no way to please these idiots."

-- every car manufacturer ever

[u/[deleted]]

I remember when the hamster commercials for this came out.

[u/ThisisFKNBS]

Korean here. Americans pronounce Seoul as soul. Even Koreans who speak very quickly can sound like soul too but it's actually two syllables.

Phonetically, the proper pronunciation is "Suh-wool" where "suh" is pronounced like you would say "what's suhp".

and /u/Doug-DeMuro, WHY DIDN'T YOU COME TO SOUTH KOREA AND REVIEW THE KIA SOUL IN SEOUL?! I'M SO MAD AT CHUUUUU /s

If Kia created this car to represent the capital of South Korea, it sure is an embarrassment.

In all seriousness, I think every generation of the Soul is ugly AF but it's a functional and practical car that I would never want.

[u/martin509984]

Anyone who is holding onto an old Toyota Matrix and wants something newer and nicer, take note.

[u/WeatherWrestlingGuy]

This and the Kia Stinger are the only Kias worth buying.