The folks at Kia are keeping their 2019 Optima, sexy, which is a good thing. The sedan certainly embodies what good car design professes to achieve.
With an updated front and rear, the Optima’s exterior is neither distracting or detracting from its overall Euro-esque design from every angle. Sleek, stylish, handsome, the sedan looks classy coming, and going and its cabin is just as impressive.
The five-passenger sedan’s interior space is tasteful, a word that comes to mind to describe its overall cohesive design. Upscale materials? Check! Roominess? Check! Adults can sit pretty comfortably in the vehicle’s front. The rear seat has adequate space for 6-footers and really good room for folks south of this height. Three adults might sit shoulder-to-shoulder across the back seat—a low, flat floor tunnel helps here. Seating in the Kia is road trip supportive enough for whatever body part touches them. Drivers can count on good sightlines to just about anywhere except for perhaps the rear-roof-pillar area which slightly slopes.
Soft-surface material with some underlying give is deployed throughout the vehicle mixed with muted satin-chrome touches and scarce amounts of bright metals.
The base kia offers a very healthy list of standard smart safety up-level features that include ABS, electronic stability control, Forward Collision-Avoidance Assistance, airbags, rear camera display, Vehicle Stability Management, Tire-Pressure Monitoring System, and Hill Start Assist Control, just to name a few. A Surround View Monitor is available that provides a virtual 360-degree view of your surroundings. By stitching together images from multiple cameras, you’re able to see your own vehicle’s place among its surroundings. This makes backing up and precision parking or parallel parking even safer.
The Optima is offered in four available trims: the LX, S, EX, and SX. The test vehicle, an SX Turbo, is at the top of the 4-tier model roster. The 245-horsepower turbo-four with 260 lb-ft of torque is the strongest of the three available Optima powerplants. It offered zesty acceleration, breezy passing maneuvers, and an overall stable, refined and quiet ride. Worth mentioning, the Optima’s good brakes provided stable stops. EPA mileage estimates for the Optima are 21 mpg/city, 30 mpg/highway, and 24 mpg/combined.
The 2019 Kia Optima has a mixed bag of offerings that would suit even the finickiest of car buyers. The Optima is aging gracefully, and Kia has maintained a vehicle that offers consistent good looks, a premium interior, and first-rate ride, that can go wheel-to-wheel with a few of its haters!
Prices start at $22,990 for the base LX and $31,990 for the SX Turbo. Need more info? www.Kia.com