The 2022 Kia Carnival Wants You to Forget It's a Van

A look around an average middle-American grocery store parking lot can leave me perplexed. The whole thing will be littered with three-row SUVs both more expensive and less practical than any van on sale. None of these SUVs will go off-road in their lifetimes, few will brave the sort of weather that stumps a van, and a tiny fraction will ever tow more than what you could hitch to a Pacifica. But it doesn’t matter. The owners don’t want vans.

The Carnival is Kia’s attempt to appeal to this set of buyers without fully capitulating to the compromises of an SUV. It adopts the chunky styling, the upright posture, and the traditional dashboard layout of a family SUV, but with the tall cabin, sliding doors, and deep-welled trunk expected of a proper minivan.

I wasn’t quite convinced that it was fooling anyone. It is assuredly more handsome in its details than any other minivan on sale in America, but still presents the same chunky, rectangular proportions that have defined the species. While I’d call it a handsome van, it’s still clearly a van. Yet when I picked up less car-obsessed friends from the airport, they took far more notice of it than any Odyssey or Sienna. So it went at Performance Car of the Year, where nobody seemed to much care about our green support Sienna but multiple guests asked about the Kia. That alone is a success.

And truly, the only one that was ever a risk. The rest of the minivan fundamentals are guaranteed crowd-pleasers, in part because the uncool segment has always had to make up ground on practicality, luxury, and comfort. The Carnival packs all three in abundance. Its second-row seats are giant, plush, and removable, a notable benefit over the Sienna with its permanently installed thrones. Such is the compromise of a hybrid drivetrain.

The Carnival instead sticks with a 3.6-liter V-6. It makes 290 hp, not that you’d ever notice or care, and 262 lb-ft of torque, which allows for what will probably be called “good pickup.” The real benefit is that this motor is under-stressed enough that you never really have to get into the noisy bit of the tach and you’ll never feel it grumbling too hard. It provides smooth, consistent power to manage highway merges with a full passenger load.

Those passengers will be treated to excellent seats in all three rows and an airy, bright cabin that Kia claims bests the rest on passenger space and maximum cargo volume. The fact that it beats even the Chevy Suburban on cargo volume sounds shocking, but anyone who has been paying attention knows that minivans have long trumped even the most gargantuan SUVs thanks to their deep cargo areas and vaulted ceilings. Superior third-row seats and ample cupholder and charging options also guarantee that the Carnival will be a better road-trip machine, too.

There’s no real fault to find here on a practical basis. The ride is fantastic, the body control surprisingly good for something this tippy, and the steering well-weighted and precise. Even the driving position is better than most SUVs. None of this is breaking new ground. The Kia’s real accomplishment is the interior, which trades the maximum-utility dorkiness of a high-console Odyssey or Sienna for a more traditional, handsome SUV layout. You lose a bit of ground in practicality–a Honda still has more cubbies and clever pockets—but the payoff is a cabin easily befitting the $47,770 sticker on my loaded tester.

It’s properly handsome and truly impressive. Passengers remarked on the reclining seats, the smart-looking dash, and the general quality of the atmosphere. It’s simply a nice place to be, on par with Kia’s stellar Telluride—the current three-row SUV king—but offering more practicality for less money.

The formula just makes sense. If you don’t tow and you don’t off-road, you’ll be better off with one of these than any so-called “SUV” that’s really a minivan with a worse cargo layout and less convenient doors. All of this has been true. The real success of the Kia is that, for some people, it’s handsome enough to convince them that a minivan can be worth it. If they make the jump, I can’t imagine they’d ever look back.