2022 Kia Carnival Review: Not Your Parents’ Minivan
2022 Kia Carnival Review: Not Your Parents’ MinivanAuto123 reviews the 2022 Kia Carnival.
I’d seen the images of the new Kia Carnival – in reality the next generation of the Korean automaker’s Sedona minivan, rebadged to sync with the nameplate used elsewhere in the world – but I was still surprised by the look of the thing when I showed up to pick up my tester. There’s not much of the traditional minivan to the 2022 Carnival MPV, or Multi-Purpose Vehicle, as Kia hopes we’ll all refer to it.
We’ll stick with minivan as a designation, thank you very much, but there’s no denying Kia made real effort to distance itself from the format as it’s been traditionally known. Which is to say, quite rounded in shape, conservative, kind of bus-like, and just plain uncool esthetically. Here, the Kia literature throws around words like bold, confident and masculine to describe the Carnival, which tells you a lot about where their design focus was.
The look
To my eye, the Carnival looks more than a little like a stretched, low-riding Ford Explorer, with its bold, bossy front end and rectangular overall shape. My wife said it’s a wagon. Kia says its design is crossover-inspired. Frankly all of those views are valid to a point, so let’s just say this is a modern reimagining of the minivan. Because once you step inside, this is still very much a minivan. And I mean that in a complimentary way.
