2024 Kia Picanto Review: Refreshed And Refreshing

It’s perhaps gone under the radar, but it seems we’re in the dying days of the petrol-powered city car. It’s a segment that really exploded in popularity for us in the UK following the 2009 scrappage scheme – allowing people into a brand-new car for a pittance. At one stage, it felt like everyone and their nan had one sitting on their driveway.

With manufacturers turning attention to bigger crossovers and electric cars in recent years though, the narrow profit margins on those cars have only shrunk as fewer people buy them, and suddenly they feel like a rare species.

The Volkswagen Up and its Seat and Skoda siblings are dead, while the Peugeot 108 and Citroen C1 are long gone. The Toyota Aygo lives on as an X, but it’s grown in size and price too. You can still buy the ancient Fiat Panda or 500, but probably not for much longer.

Otherwise, you’re only left with two options if you want a tiny, dinosaur-fuelled city car these days – the platform-related Hyundai i10 and the Kia Picanto. With both cars’ current generations introduced in 2019 and 2017 respectively, it wouldn’t have been a shock for the Hyundai Motor Group to quietly let both die. Instead, each has been updated within the last year.

It’s the Picanto, the latter of the pair to get its facelift, that we’re focusing on here with its recent arrival on UK roads. Immediately, the refresh seems to be an impactful one.

As with pretty much everything else in the Kia range, it’s been given a new look to bring it more in line with its swathe of new EVs. In the case of the Picanto, it looks like it’s trying to cosplay as a miniature EV9 at the front and it works surprisingly well. I’m also a particular fan of the rear lightbar, giving the city car more of a new-generation look than a mere facelift.

Changes inside aren’t all that substantial by comparison. Really, the biggest alterations 
come on the equipment list here. All versions now get an 8.0-inch touchscreen as standard, which was once the preserve of the ‘3’ trim and up, as well as a digital instrument cluster. That also means Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are included as standard across the range for the first time, which is a pleasing point to mention.

It’s no bad thing that the interior has largely been left alone, really. Bonus shoutout to the fact that there’s still a physical control for pretty much everything on the car as opposed to cramming any commonly-used features in the infotainment.

It feels pretty solidly built and although materials do feel a little cheap in places, that’s completely forgivable on a car that starts at £15,595 and for which at most you’ll pay £19,415 if you want the full bells-and-whistles with an auto gearbox.

Sure, something like a Dacia Sandero is cheaper still and a bit bigger but the Picanto is around £1,000 cheaper than a like-for-like Aygo X. That sort of sum matters at this end of the market, as does its seven-year warranty.

The engine line-up has been streamlined with this refresh, and for the worse in our enthusiast-focused minds at least. Gone is the 1.0-litre 99bhp option which, in a car weighing around 900kg, was a pretty hilarious thing to hoon around in.

You've a choice between a 1.2-litre four-pot, or the naturally-aspirated 1.0-litre driven here with 62bhp and 69lb ft of torque. It’s just as slow as you’d imagine – paired up with a surprisingly sweet-feeling five-speed manual gearbox, it’s quoted as hitting 62mph in 15.4 seconds.

Really, that’s not going to matter to the vast majority of people buying it as something to bimble to the shops from their bungalow in, but it does make merging a real pain. You can be thrashing the absolute tits off it coming onto a dual carriageway only to still rattle a mid-spec BMW 3-series driver hanging off your rear bumper. Ask me how I know.

The good news is it is perfectly pleasant to zip around in at any other time. Visibility is very good, it rides well which is no surprise as there’s not a lot of weight for the suspension to deal with, and light-set steering will be a real relief for Joyce’s elbow joints. As will the fact it’s probably the easiest car on sale right now to get into a parking space, bar perhaps the Citroen Ami. Oh, and it’ll crack 50mpg effortlessly.

You can even have a bit of fun with it on a twisty road, provided you can carry the momentum through. It’s one of those cars that feels like you’re going a lot faster than you truly are, so you can keep it pinned on the twisty stuff without really getting into trouble. It doesn’t roll about a great deal either.

There was a time when a tiny, cheaply-built city car was a miserable prospect. Yet, with the rise of big, heavy crossovers and pretty much everything on the market now having some form of electrified option thrust upon us, there’s a real refreshment in the updated Kia Picanto.

It’s an honest car that aims to do nothing more than get you from point A to B in a pleasant enough manner, and there’s something to be said for that in 2024.