Kia’s upcoming EV9 is one of the highly anticipated large 7-seater electric SUVs that is to hit the Australian market later this year.
Kia Australia has now revealed details of the local ride and handling tuning of the suspension that’s underway.
This testing involves putting the car through a series of vehicle dynamics tests to ensure the EV9 offers a ride setup that is to Australian drivers’ expectations and suits the local road conditions.
Kia Australia performed similar testing prior to launching the Kia EV6, its first ground-up EV into the market last year.
“As the new halo product for the Kia brand, it was imperative that Kia Australia localised the EV9 to suit our roads and lifestyle,” Kia Australia’s general manager of products, Roland Rivero said.
“We went through our normal robust program which commenced in Korea followed by detailed damper and steering development on Aussie roads, while collaborating closely with our colleagues from Namyang, who actually came to Australia with our key suppliers to support us throughout the process.
“The EV9 delivers a refined and polished ride across the varying conditions the Australian terrain offers.”
Chief ride and handling engineer, Graeme Gambold, said the EV9 is surprisingly nimble despite its dimensions and mass.
The Kia EV9 is a large vehicle with a length of 5.01m, and the suspension tuning also takes into consideration the ride comfort for when owners take their cars off the urban roads onto rougher surfaces.
According to Kia’s testing team, it does well in absorbing bumps at higher speeds on country roads as well.
The local variants of the EV9 include the standard-range RWD variant which has a 76.1 kWh battery pack along with a 99.8 kWh battery-equipped AWD long-range variant.
More details on the local specifications will be announced later this year in October when the Kia EV9 is launched.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.