January is always the best month for car sales and figures released by SIMI last week show that new car sales for the first month of 2025 were up 7% on January 2024.
Significantly, sales of fully electric cars experienced a record-breaking month with the highest sales recorded to-date, 4,925 registrations in January, representing a 20% increase when compared to 4,093 in January 2024.
Petrol cars remain the leader at 28.24%, followed by Hybrid (petrol electric) at 24.89%, Diesel at 16.31%, Electric at 14.69% and Plug-in Electric Hybrid at 14.17%.
So, it’s looking positive for EVs after a bad year in 2024. The charging network is slowly improving, in the east of the country at least and while the Government didn’t give any additional grants to encourage motorists to switch to electric cars in the last budget, they didn’t reduce any of the offers either.
Kia has come a long way since they entered the Irish market in the early part of this century with an impressive range of diesel and petrol cars. They have produced cars with excellent ICE engines and have not dropped their standards with their EV range.
The Soul EV was the first fully electric car to win the Continental Irish Car of the Year award in 2020. Since then, Kia have introduced the EV6, the massive EV9 and last week I drove the neater Kia EV3.
The EV3, which borrows some technology from the EV9, is described as a compact crossover and my test car came in a very attractive lime-green colour, with some lovely touches of black. Henry Ford’s favourite colour is used on the bottom of the doors, at the front and back and the attractive external look is topped off with black alloys. Officially the body colour is Adventure Green.
And the interior was equally attractive, with a simple but attractive design which makes the cabin look bright and cheerful.
The dash is dominated by a 30-inch display which incorporates a 12.3-inch driver cluster, a five-inch air con panel and another 12.3-inch touch screen for navigation and entertainment. That all sounds huge, but the screen is not too wide and it seamlessly blends in with the interior colours.
The door handles pop out when you approach the car with the key fob in your pocket or purse. But unlike Renault cars the central locking is not applied when you walk away from the car. At first you might think it’s a two-door car as the rear door handles are very discreet.
In the cabin, there is ample of room for five adults and lots of storage space for phones, notebooks, pens etc.
There is plenty of boot space, officially 460 litres and you get a 25-litre frunk, but as usual with most electric cars, no spare wheel.
There are two battery options, 58.3 kWh which should give you a range of approximately 436km or the larger 81.4 kWh batter where the range is quoted as 605km. As usual, you would need perfect weather conditions to achieve those figures I have mentioned.
Prices start at €36,790 for the Earth 2 version and the top of the range GT-line version I drove will cost you €47,190. Road tax is €120 in all models.
One word describes the Adventure Green version, with some nice black exterior touches that I drove …. gorgeous.
