2023 Kia Seltos S review

Kia’s cheapest Seltos, known as the S, is the compact SUV bargain. It’s roomy, it looks good, it has a few nice bits and pieces, and now with upgraded safety features it does everything you want in this type of car. It nails the school/shop/commute, will cheerfully whistle along the freeway at 110km/h, and is mostly pretty comfortable.

The launch version of the S had a few little cheap moments, though, chief among them the horrible plastic steering wheel. Despite the occasional cheapness, I liked it – it was honest, simple transport that did a great job for a great price.

Along with progress come price rises, though, and the entry-level Kia Seltos S is now a few grand more than when it arrived, and it now doesn’t need the Safety Pack added because it’s standard. 

So it’s still exceptional value, but has Kia missed the more obvious choices in its quest for budget glory?

When the Seltos arrived, it kind of changed the way we viewed compact SUVs in Australia. Most of them were – and some still are – jacked-up hatchbacks that don’t deliver much in the way of extra interior space. The relative newcomer Corolla Cross, Mazda CX-30 and the original Hyundai Kona do little for rear seat passengers over their hatchback DNA. The Seltos delivered an interior fit for a size up and that got tongues wagging. 

The entry-level Seltos S still starts at under $30,000, despite the recent addition of a number of safety features and a few cosmetic ones. For $29,500 plus on-road costs, you drive out of the dealer with 16-inch alloy wheels (replacing hilarious dinky-looking hubcapped steel wheels), auto halogen headlights, an 8.0-inch touchscreen, a six-speaker stereo, cloth trim, power-folding mirrors, front and rear parking sensors, power windows and a space-saver spare.

I am going to grumble once, and once only, about the change Kia should have made – the plastic steering wheel is still a bit nasty and I would take a leather (or leather-like one) over alloy wheels any day. The alloys look barely better than the steelies they replace, and no amount of bling is going to change the fact the tyres are high-profile, low-rolling resistance items that don’t quite fill the arches.

I am not a product planner, and almost certainly the fine folks at Kia know something I don’t about what customers want, but I reckon it would give the interior a nice little lift. After a week, you wouldn’t even notice the steelies if they’d stayed.

The inside of the Seltos is huge and leads the category not in actual volume but almost certainly in useable volume. The Range Rover homage exterior means it’s light and airy inside, with heaps of head room for all occupants as well as plenty of leg room.

Being the entry level, the front seats are fairly frumpy to look at but deliver a pretty comfortable experience once you’re seated on them. The centre console hosts a pair of cupholders and a tall console bin with an armrest on top. Ahead of the shifter is a great space for your phone with its USB and 12V port but sadly no wireless charging, which is annoying because CarPlay is wireless. Again, as it's the entry level, you’ll see a few blank switches but the drive mode dial stays.

The dash design is fairly conservative, but a couple of splashes of texture, shaping and a speaker grille on the top of the dash break up what could have been a lot of grey plastic. The 8.0-inch touchscreen looks a little lost in its housing, but it more than does the job. The steering wheel might be plastic, but it's festooned with buttons and rocker switches for stereo, cruise and information functions.

The doors have more splashes of colour to break up the plastic as well as door pockets with handy-sized bottle holders.

Moving to the rear, it all gets a bit bland. There is no armrest, so no cupholders, but the MY23 includes rear air vents right up and down the range, which is a thoughtful touch. The lack of armrest has always annoyed me, and again I’d have that over alloy wheels.

Due to the inclusion of a space-saver spare, the Kia Seltos S scores an increase in boot size to a decent 468 litres (up from 443 in other variants with a full-size spare), while folding the 60:40-split second-row seating increases the load area to 1428L.

Front and centre in the Seltos is an 8.0-inch touchscreen with Kia’s basic software. There’s not much to it, just an easy-to-use (if not easy to look at) AM/FM radio interface. You get a reasonably generous six speakers, which are fine but won’t be troubling the window glass with thumping bass.

Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are both wireless, but without the charging pad they're only half useful. The Seltos mostly picked up my iPhone without drama, with just one glitch during the week. You can charge with a USB-A and USB-C port in the front, and there’s also a 12-volt for the old-schoolers.

The screen’s hardware is quite good, responding quickly to every touch and never left me thinking it could be better. CarPlay takes up the whole screen and looks good, and despite being wireless it is also pretty snappy. That’s especially helpful given the lack of inbuilt sat nav.

If you just want to use the basic Kia interface for Bluetooth streaming, you can. It’s not the last word in user experience, but I’ve seen a lot worse in my time too.

The Seltos S is the only variant in the Seltos range to miss out on Kia Connect, meaning it's not possible to remotely connect to your car from a smartphone and check fuel levels, lock and unlock the doors, or remind yourself where you last parked. This feature is offered on other models in the Seltos range.

When the Kia Seltos launched in 2019, the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP) awarded the model line-up the full five-star rating, and the maximum rating carried over for all vehicles manufactured from November 2022.

ANCAP awarded the Seltos range 85 per cent for adult occupant protection, 83 per cent for child occupant protection, 61 per cent for vulnerable road users (pedestrians) and 70 per cent for safety assist systems.

The Seltos S has six airbags, the usual stability and traction controls, high-beam assist, lane-following assist, safe-exit warning, and front and rear parking sensors. For 2023, the Seltos (finally) picks up reverse cross-traffic alert.

Forward AEB is also present and correct but is Kia’s camera-based version, which means full emergency braking at speeds only up to 80km/h. Over that, it’s a bit calmer on the brake pedal as cameras aren’t as effective over 80km/h as a radar-based solution. The more expensive Seltos Sport+ and GT-Line models add in more advanced AEB with cyclist detection and junction intervention.

The speed warning function is much less frantic than the sat-nav-equipped models, with just a soft bing instead of shouting at you all the time. It didn’t spot school zones so it defaulted to 40km/h no matter the time or day, with a subtle flashing of the speed limit it thinks you should be holding in the 4.2-inch digital dash display between the dials.

There’s some good news and bad news on the maintenance front. The good news is that there’s a long seven-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty, beaten only in length by Mitsubishi’s 10-year/200,000km offering. On top of that, a capped-price servicing regime stretches for seven services or 105,000km. Also very good.

Less good is the cost of those services. Some are already well above what you will pay for a Corolla Cross or Honda HR-V, with the Seltos’s cheapest weighing in at $288. One nudges the $500 mark and two blow straight past $600. That’s a lot for a reasonably priced car, and it’s really the only place the Kia value proposition falters, with an average annual service bill of just over $400.

The annual insurance premium of $1201.47 is based on a comparative quote for a 35-year-old male driver living in Chatswood, NSW. Insurance estimates may vary based on your location, driving history, and personal circumstances.

The value returns when you look at the fuel use. Kia says the Seltos S will use 6.9 litres per 100 kilometres on the combined cycle. While it isn’t especially thrifty, the 7.9L/100km we recorded was in a mostly urban-bound week and bettered the official urban figure of 8.8L/100km by a decent margin.

You also don’t have to go with fancy petrol as the Seltos only requires 91-octane regular unleaded, which is just as well given the fairly meek power figures.

Perhaps the worst thing about the Seltos is the dreary drivetrain. The 2.0 MPI is fine, I guess. Reasonably quiet, reasonable on fuel, it’s all terribly reasonable but also terribly dull. Mustering up just 110kW and 180Nm from its 2.0 litres of capacity, it’s modern but in an old-fashioned way.

I could say the same thing about naturally aspirated Corolla Crosses and Hyundai Konas, and it’s one of the great irritations that this segment has such bland engine options. Even the 1.6-litre turbo versions of the Seltos aren’t particularly interesting.

To get the power to the road, Kia has fitted a continuously variable transmission. I have never been a fan of this particular type of gearbox, but before the facelift it was the one to have, and better than the turbo’s old twin-clutch. Even with the turbo switching to an eight-speed torque converter, the CVT still holds up quite well against it.

The advantage of CVTs is that they work exceptionally well in low-torque applications, and 180Nm is low even by the less-than-lofty standards of the compact SUV market. What it does really well is provide a bit of urgency when you put your foot down from a standstill. Some CVTs have a bit of a think about things, check the weather, see how their stocks are going, and then apply themselves to the task. 

Kia’s engineers rightly considered that a really annoying trait and have banished it, making the Seltos a very useful tool in traffic. It’s not that it’s fast, it’s more that it is responsive and happy to get the job done rather than whining – or worse, droning – at you.

Despite the dinky 16-inch wheels looking a little silly on first acquaintance, the return is a really good ride both in town and on the freeway. The torsion beam rear end is bettered only by Citroen’s wily engineers with a mostly pillowy ride.

Body control is good, although it does lean a bit in corners but nothing untoward. B-road-style excursions do show it up to be a bit of an understeerer, but it’s all very gentle, and you know it’s coming because the tyres wail mournfully long before they give up.

It has a better ride than the bigger-wheeled cars in the range and is far better than the GT-Line around the city. Comfortable, quiet, composed and reasonably refined.

The Kia Seltos S is good buying if you’re looking for probably the best overall value proposition. As an entry-level model, it’s very enticing for its relatively low price-to-metal ratio, and now with more standard safety features it is less of a risk.

It’s a good family car – if a bit sparsely furnished in the rear – but it absolutely gets the job done without being grim. You can’t say that about a base-model MG ZS.

Start with the Kia website after you’ve established your budget. You can build and price a car on there, and play around with the specification levels to confirm the S is for you. And if it isn’t, you can compare the different levels side by side.

The S is close to being the sweet spot, but if you have more to spend, the Sport or Sport+ vie for your dollar with a few more niceties but a really annoying speed warning system.

You can find a range of Kia Seltos models for sale at Drive.com.au/cars-for-sale or you can find your local Kia dealer here. If you’re looking at the Seltos S purely on price, it’s the one to test drive. However, if you’ve got a bit more to spend, it’s worth driving the Sport to see if it is worth the extra.

Current waiting times are around six months for most Seltos variants, but Kia Australia tells us that the production situation changes regularly and the local arm works to find extra supply at every opportunity.

If you want to stay updated with everything that's happened to this car since our review, you'll find all the latest news here.