Archive for February, 2018
Private Fleet Car Review: 2018 Kia Sorento Si
I and Kia continue our long and proud association with the 2018 Kia Sorento Si seven seater spending a few days in the garage before two weeks of Stinger. The car provided has a RRP of $42990 plus metallic paint (Metal Stream) at $595 for a total price of $43585.
There’s been some minor changes, both visible and non, compared to the previous model. The petrol engine has increased in size to 3.5L, up from 3.3L. Peak power of 206 kW is seen at 6500 rpm, and peak torque of 336 Nm comes in at 5000 rpm. This means the 4800 mm long, 1932 kg Si, capable of towing 2000 kilograms, has fuel consumption figures of 14.2L per 100 km of standard unleaded from the 71 litre tank around town. Get out on the highway and that drops by nearly half to 7.6L/100 km for the 2WD Si. A new eight speed auto is to thank for that and, quite simply, the combination of turbine smooth engine and silky sweet auto is superb.
The Si is the entry level model of a four model Sorento range and comes well loaded with standard and safety equipment. Hold on: A digital and analogue dash features across the range, as does an eight inch touchscreen (up an inch on the previous model) with DAB audio, satnav, safety audio settings for driving, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay with voice control, multi-function steering wheel controls, three 12V and two USB sockets, six airbags including side curtain, Driver Attention Alert, Advanced Smart Cruise Control, and metallic look interior trim. 
That last one is an issue in the Australian climate as heat soak lends itself to burned fingertips. There’s six cup holders (two per seat row), four bottle holders (one in each door pocket), and a cargo blind is standard as well.
The interior itself has received a mild freshen up, with new look plastics, a redesign to the look for the steering wheel and its controls, even the touchscreen and surrounds have been mildly massaged. It’s clean and elegant to both look at and touch. What’s missing from the inside is privacy glass for the rear seat passengers. Although the Si’s seats are cloth there’s no heating or venting until the GT-Line level. However dual zone climate control is standard from the Si up. It’s manual seat adjustment for the Si and Sport, with the SLi gaining power seats and two position lumbar support. The GT-Line goes to four way adjustment and thigh support.
Leg room is always good for the front seats and good enough for most in the centre. The folding rear seats are compromised by design for leg room but wouldn’t be used, one would suspect, for anything other than city style journeying. As always though Kia’s bent towards simplicity when needed is seen here with simple pull straps employed to raise and lower the third row seats. When they and the mid row seats are folded, there’s a huge 1662L of cargo space available.
Outside the Sorento has also been given a light massage. The tail lights have been changed in look as has the front bumper, with a smooth scallop underneath the restyled headlights. A slimmer look to the headlight structure which incorporates the LED driving lights and a restyling to the bumper’s design bring a fresher look to the exterior overall. The rubber is from Nexen, being 235/65/17, and is also the smallest tyre/wheel combination of the four.
Although they’re a high sidewall, there’s still plenty of chirping from the front even from what could be called a medium throttle application. That speaks more about the tyres themselves than the engine, given the high revs needed for peak torque. Ride quality, as a result, is somewhat spongy, soft, with a reasonable rebound from the front end over some rather large speedbumps. The rear seems somewhat more tied down in comparison.
The chassis itself is beautiful. Taken through a downhill rural road that has a mix of sweeping curves, tightening radius corners, and a couple of straights long enough to wind up before braking, it holds on and changes direction with minimal weight transfer. Even on the somewhat spongy Nexen rubber, there’s little to no doubt that you can throw the Sorento Si around and come out the other side.
The Drive modes are accessible via a tab in the centre console and have me wondering why they’re still offered. In all of AWT’s exposure to such they’ve been barely and rarely used and moreso to find out if they made a difference to the actual feel of driving. There’s Comfort/Eco/Sport/Smart, with the last an adaptive system to road and driving conditions. Sport holds gear longer and loads up the steering, Eco is designed (and more suitable for) long distance driving as would Comfort suit as well.
As mentioned, the engine and transmission are utterly harmonious in their partnership. Light throttle application has the big machine underway easily and with no perceptible change of ratio. Light the candle and the Sorento will scamper away with alacrity. There’s no vibration in the driveline and absolutely no sense of strain or stress. Jaguar’s V12 was known for its smoothness and this combination would be on a par.
On an uphill run, where traffic ahead slows forward progress and then clears, a moderate shove of the go pedal has a momentary hesitation, a deep inhale, before launching forward with surprising speed.
As always there’s Kia’s seven year warranty, seven year roadside assistance package, and capped price servicing for seven years or every 15,000 kilometres.
At The End Of The Drive.
The Kia Sorento Si is for those that want an SUV to move people but don’t want a people mover. The fact that it’s not an off-road oriented car, due to its 2WD and no transfer case, means it’s likely to be used for ferrying the kids to and from school and to sports activities on the weekend. And this highlights the Achilles heel of the Sorento Si with a petrol engine. Economy was never been a strong point of the 3.3L and an urban figure over over 14.0L per 100 km doesn’t aid the cause. We finished close to 11.0L/100km which is more reasonable but still largely unacceptable.
But if fuel consumption is something not to be fussed about, and a large, comfortable, well equipped, good handling and driving SUV is what appeals, this is one that ticks far too many boxes to be ignored. Here’s where you can find more: 2018 Kia Sorento information
Reinventing The Wheel – Several Times
They say that you shouldn’t try reinventing the wheel. But why shouldn’t you try to reinvent the wheel? After all, wheels have been reinvented several times over the course of history, and they’ve got better and better every time – something that most motorists of today should appreciate. Let’s face it: there are more wheels in your car than the ones that actually touch the tarmac.
Let’s go back to when the wheel was first invented, which, according to archaeologists, was about 3800–3500 BC. Before they had the wheel, the way that they hauled large loads about the place was to put it on a sled sort of thing. You can try this for yourself some time: compare pulling a large rock across grass straight and then put it on a plank or a piece of tin or something and see how much easier it is. They think that this is how they managed to build the Pyramids and Stonehenge, by the way.
During the sled years, they worked out that if you put rollers under a sled, it gets even easier to pull a load along. The only trouble with rollers is that someone has to take the ones that have just popped out the back of the load to the front of the load, and if you’re not quick enough, then everything comes to a standstill. Then some absolute genius had an idea: what if you could fix rollers permanently under a sled? That gave us the axle. Then another genius realised that if you have a larger round thing on the end of the roller, then the sled is off the ground completely and the load can be pulled much faster. Hey presto: wheels.
Solid wheels on an ox cart from China.
The wheels on early carts and vehicles weren’t made out of stone, which you might be picturing if you’ve seen the Flintstones. Stone wheels did exist, but these tended to be used for grinding grain rather than for transport. The early wheels were wooden, and tended to be made of several pieces of wood carefully shaped (tree trunks aren’t always perfectly round) and clamped around the axle in the middle. However, these wheels were really, really heavy. With a pair of oxen hitched to the front, a cart could go at about 3 km per hour, which is fine if what you need to do is to carry a large load, but for getting yourself from A to B, it was quicker to walk.
Enter the first reinvention of the wheel. Another unknown genius looked at the wheel and wondered how to reduce the weight to get better speed and greater efficiency (much like car designers do today). This genius realised that what you need is the roundness of the outside of the wheel, the bit in the middle that hold the axle and something in between to hold the outer circle to the inner circle. In other words, you need the rim, the hub and the spokes. This reduced the weight of the wheel dramatically, meaning that vehicles could go faster. The combination of hub, spoke and rim was also a lot more aesthetically pleasing, as anyone who has looked at the designs of alloy wheels knows. This may be why it just feels right to have alloy wheels on a sports car: somewhere deep down in the human psyche, we know that spoked wheels go faster.
And they certainly did go faster. After the spoked wheel was invented, it became more feasible to use horses to power the vehicle. Horses were to oxen what turbocharged petrol is to diesel. Diesel’s great at low speeds and for serious towing but for fast sporty stuff, you go for petrol. Where you’ve got speed, you’ve got to consider handling as well, especially if you want to corner tightly. This led to the development of the two-wheeled chariot – possibly the earliest example of a rear wheel drive? Most recorded uses and images of chariots were used in a battle context and no, they weren’t usually used in head-on charges, despite what you might see in the movies. That sort of manoeuvre would just lead to pile-ups. If you’ve got something that fast and easy to turn, it’s better strategy to use the chariot to come in from the side and either drop off infantry or else shoot from the chariot itself before pelting away like mad.
This model comes fitted with classy six-spoke wheels for improved speed and better handling…
It probably didn’t take too long after the invention of chariots for people to try racing them. It’s human nature when presented with something that moves fast to try to see who’s got the fastest. Chariot racing was as popular back then as motorsport is today. In Babylon, they enjoyed racing about on the asphalt – on the streets and on the top of the massive city walls (and yes, they did use actual real asphalt for road surfacing in Ancient Babylon).
There were two real problems with these lightweight chariot wheels. Firstly, the chariot sat right on top of the axle and there was no suspension system to even out the bumps, which must have made a fast dash extremely uncomfortable for the charioteer and the archer riding up with him (or her, in the case of the Celts). Leaf suspension is said to based on the technology of the bow and the Egyptians are said to have used it. The second problem was that round bits of wood chipped and broke really easily. This led to reinvention number two: tyres (or “tires”, which is believed to be a shortened form of “attire”, suggesting that a wheel needed to be properly dressed).
Early tyres weren’t the rubber air-filled things we know today. Instead, they were made of metal bands that contracted onto the rims as they cooled. This protected the rim but increased road noise like mad. It also made the jarring and jolting worse. They made attempts to soften the steel with leather, but this only went so far and leather wore out pretty quickly with heavy use.
Metal tyres were the norm for millennia. Solid rubber tyres were tried once rubber had been made more widespread. However, rubber was really, really bouncy, making the ride even worse (we don’t know how lucky we are with modern suspension and shock absorbers). It wasn’t until the mid- to late 1800s that first a Scotsman called Robert Thompson and then another Scotsman called Charles Dunlop independently had the idea of making a hollow tube of rubber and fitting that around the rim of a tyre, which softened the ride without too much bounce. Yes, that is Dunlop as in Dunlop tyres. This was reinvention of the wheel Number Three. Vulcanizing the rubber around the pneumatic tyre to make it tougher and more resistant to punctures was again invented independently by inventors on both sides of the Atlantic with more familiar names: Charles Goodyear and Thomas Hancock. One hundred years after the invention of the pneumatic tyre, Michelin developed radial tyres and put these straight away onto the cars made by the company they had just bought out, Citroën.
The Virtruvian mill, one of the earliest gearing systems.
In the meantime across the ages, wheels weren’t just being used for transport. Once the principle of the wheel and axle had been invented, it was used elsewhere. One of the key ways that wheels were used in the hot conditions of the Near East and the Mediterranean was to lift water out of rivers up and into the irrigation channels of gardens and fields; the other was to grind grain into flour for daily bread. The early versions, which needed something to turn the wheel vertically were a chore to turn – think treadmills. Somebody realised that if you fit teeth near the rim of the solid wheel that’s turning in the vertical plane, you can make a second wheel being turned in the horizontal plane with similar teeth move the first wheel around. In other words, they invented gears for irrigation systems and for grain mills, making this another reinvention of the wheel. Before long, they were playing around with gearing ratios – this was one of the things that Archimedes (yes, the one who ran through the streets naked shouting “Eureka!”) tinkered around with and refined.
Gears got really sophisticated over the centuries, especially for things like clockwork, but it wasn’t until the development of the internal combustion engine that these toothed wheels could be used for transport. You can’t have the wheels turning at a speed that would make the cart or coach run faster than the horses pulling it. It was Bertha Benz after her historic drive in the first motor car who had the idea of adding gears to the mechanism so a car could go uphill better. At long last, the two branches of wheel development had come together, giving us the vehicles we know today, more or less.
Level 2, 9 Help Street