2021 Kia Carnival: The best full-size big-family car just got better
Have a big family? If your clan takes up space, physically or numerically, Carnival should be top of your shopping list.
Every seven-seat SUV on the market is a dimensional compromise beyond the second row.
I’m not kidding, from the enormous new Hyundai Palisade and Santa Fe or Kia Sorento, to the Mazda CX-9, even a Toyota LandCruiser or Prado have limitations when you need to add extra kids and their stuff.
For example, if you’re at 20 weeks and are expecting triplets, along with the 4200 other sets of triplets born in Australia every year, then you’re instantly going to require three independent isofix anchorage points. Or, if you're planning on three kids separately over the next few years, you’re probably gonna need three isofix points, or, even if you have a kid in a child seat now and don't plan on stopping soon, you won’t get three isofix points in a regular seven seat SUV.
Sure, you’ll find 5 top tether points in most of them, but top tethering is the more primitive easy of securing our kids nowadays. Its isofix all the way in the Carnival. As is enough room to walk through the second row into seats 6 and 7, with bags attached.
I mean, kids, however young or old, always come with stuff. It’s a perpetual plus-1 concept, right? If it’s not their bags or an object, it’s an additional person. Or two. You want your kids to make friends, yeah?
Essentially, what I’m saying here is, a Kia Carnival lets your kids have friends.
If you’ve been fortunate enough to bring twins or triplets into the world - not only do I personally salute your efforts as parents (like, how do you do it?!) - but you are going to have to compromise and sacrifice if you choose a seven seater. End of story.
Or is it? [Cue the Imperial March]
Enter: Kia Carnival. The only full-size seven seater on the market which actually drives like a normal car - not a van with bench seats - and will happily take every single nappy bag, triplet or twin pram, scooter and cricket bag you can throw in it, while also accommodating four isofix compatible child seats.
But it gets better than that. (And you don’t need a ute to have lots of space for stuff.)
Outgoing Carnival outsold its nearest rival 7 to 1, routinely, for years because it did things SUVs can’t do: comfort x 7.
HIGH COMMAND
The new Carnival is going to be an exciting place to sit, and that’s not even including your kids yet.
The ability to rotate the second row outboard seats and effectively let your little dictators have a conference, back there, while mum and dad chauffeur them to their high priority playgroup summits, is going to earn you praise. The dog will also appreciate the expanse into which he/she can relax on those too-rare trips to the beach.
You’ll also appreciate that the outgoing Carnival has curtain airbags in all three rows and it’s all but guaranteed to recur in the new one. Unlike the disappointment of third-row curtain airbags lacking in the new Sorento.
Then theres the limousine-inspired conference communication intercom between the enslaved (chauffeurs 1 &2) up front and the VIPs. That’s right. You can now check with your power-players whether they’d like to take the scenic route home, or circle the block awaiting for the press gallery to assemble.
One other point is that the Kia Carnival will also make a great car for taking camping, especially if you plan on casual touring or heading down light-duty gravel roads to campsites. You’ve got heaps of room inside the car long before having to hitch a trailer or put a luggage pod up top. It really is a multi-purpose vehicle, with practicality and serious comfort all-in-one.
SPACE ENABLERS
The deliberate design of SUVs to look as un-like an SUV as possible, that is, to swoop the rear roofline downward as early as possible after the back doors means there’s never going to be as much space as there might’ve been in a people mover.
If you can divorce yourself from the unfair perception of the people mover as being unsexy and boxy and too big and hard to park - blah blah blah - and you start to realise it’s exactly the same size (give or take a few millimetres) as a Toyota LandCruiser, which sells just as well in suburbia as it does the country, then you’re most of the way to buying a new car like a ninja.
See, the outgoing Carnival was 5.11 metres long and 1.98 metres wide. A LandCruiser 200 Series is 4.99 metres long and 1.98 metres wide as well. And I see mums and dads ferrying their kids around in the Australian off-road warrior every week, with no dents and scratches to red-flag their buying decision.
The difference with the Kia Carnival is that it’s kept the profile of a people mover, but doesn’t look like one - it looks like a slightly boxier large SUV. It’s the same size as a Mazda CX-9 in fact, again, with a few millimetres either way. And all this size comparison is about is showing you how much better off you are with a Carnival in many respects. For starters, long roadtrips are bearable for any kids or even adults who sit in rows two or three - they can actually stretch their legs thanks to a wheelbase of over three metres (3.06m to be exact). The new Carnival gets another 30mm in the wheelbase, meaning 3.09m for those too tired to do the maths.
A CX-9 has only 2.93m, the LandCruiser: 2.85m. Toyota Kluger: 2.79. The nearest rival, the Honda Odyssey? 2.9m. Nothing can come close to the Kia Carnival for offering space to its occupants and storage for their stuff.
So, let’s talk about that stowage space, because in the old Carnival, you got a massive 960 litres of volume. Now, usually most motoring journalists try to bring along a bag or maybe a flimsy pram to ‘demonstrate’ (if you can use such a verb) the relative size of a boot space. When I tested the outgoing Carnival in 2019, with three enormous American Tourister luggage bags, our big pram and my backpacks of camera gear, I barely put a dent in that 960 litres behind the third row seats. When you folded the third row down, you got a Toyota Hiace-rivalling 2220 litres.
In the new Carnival, they’ve readjusted the profile of the third row to offer a bit more legroom (given legs usually come standard with kids, and less-so for bags), to give you a still-large 670 cubic litres to the top of the seat backs. Without having tested it yet, I suspect the large lift-out cavity below the floor in the old Carnival has been deleted/fixed for tyre-changing equipment and/or to better store the third row perfectly flat. I’ll get back to you on that one once I get my hands on a press vehicle later this year.
Your kids can also get their scooters in and out much easier than the old Carnival and with a lot less scratching of the rear bumper like in a high-riding SUV.
I know this because the the lift-over height for the boot lip is 26mm lower than the old Carnival at 640mm. Most full-size SUVs have a much higher rear boot floor, so it’s inevitable junior is gonna try putting their bike, helmet, scooter, pogo stick into the boot themselves because, “I’m a big boy/girl, I can do it myself, dad!”
[THUMP]—[SCRAPE] Yeah. Nah. That’s not coming out.
I sat in the car with my kid the other day and watched three young boys, aged about eight to 10 all successfully remove their scooters from the boot-well of a second-generation Carnival without a single scruffed bike pedal or scraped scooter.
Here’s why: an SUV wants you to think you need to be high-riding and boasting of ground clearance. But the reality is it just means there’s less internal volume for the designers to offer you as they try to keep the car’s overall size and shape as reduced as possible. Because the more physical car there is (metal, glass, plastic, rubber etc) the more expensive it will be for you.
So here’s the trick. Assess. How many kids do you have now and how many do you plan to have in the next couple of years? Be honest. I’m not saying have less kids. They’re the best thing in this world, so by all means, have as many as you want.
Just be realistic about how much stuff you’re going to have in your entourage. If you’re stopping at two - you don’t need a Carnival. A midsize SUV will do you just fine, especially if you have plans to head out on holidays.
If you’ve struck gold and hit triplets on your first round, I’d suggest a Carnival is your only option if the discussion about tying tubes or ‘The Snip’ is a long way off.
Kids mean stuff. And big families mean stuff-cubed. Kia Carnival is the best in class.
Email me anything you want to know about the Kia Carnival; its a brilliant vehicle when you can look past the big-daddy-transport aspect.