Road Test: Kia Venga 1.4 CRDi 2 5dr

The Venga is shamelessly going after the ‘blue-rinse pound’, or whatever you want to call it. With older people insisting on getting even older, this market is one that can only continue to grow, and Kia has no qualms about making a bee-line for their retirement funds.

Kia says the Venga falls into the ‘B-plus’ segment, which makes it bigger than a Fiesta, but smaller than a Cee’d. So it’s basically a tall hatchback in the same mould as a Ford Fusion or Vauxhall Meriva. It’s on the same platform as the funkier Soul, but slightly taller so getting in (and out) is a cinch.

Inside, the practicality continues. Take the seats as an example. Sometimes, it’s lovely to have friends along for the ride, but when you drop them off, their legroom becomes wasted space. In the Venga you can slide the rear seats forward, which decimates the legroom, but allows the bootspace to grow. You can split them 60/40 too. It’s not a new concept, but makes sense in a small car where usable space is always going to be at a premium.

The same seats fold flat at the yank of a lever, and there’s a compartment in the boot floor to hide things from prying eyes. You can get 18 litres of whatever you like in there, and it boosts seats-up bootspace to 570 litres, which incidentally is more than the Golf Estate on the edge of this page. Thank the high roofline for that.

In the driver’s seat, things are what Gordon Brown might call ‘prudent’. The steering steers and the suspension suspends, but after a while anyone keen to exploit the Venga’s driving thrills will slip into a disinterested snooze. We’re promised that UK cars will feel more lively (we drove a Euro-spec version), but whether the Freedom Pass target market will appreciate this difference will probably remain something of a mystery.

The 1.4-litre diesel feels flat until about 2,500rpm when the boost arrives and jolts you from slumber. It’s not as silky as some but remember, this is a Kia and you’re not paying for silk. It does its job just fine and reinforces it with stats of 60mpg and 124g/km CO2. It’s priced similarly to most rivals but don’t forget the seven-year warranty, which blitzes anything offered by anyone else.

If you need this sort of transport, but aren’t retired enough to want a Venga, turn to p151 of this magazine and behold TopGear’s favourite alternative in this segment – the Citroen C3 Picasso. It may cost a few hundred more, but it does the slidey seat trick and the tons of storage thing too, while also proving that you don’t need to be boring to be practical.