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"The everything car." "A four-seat wonder car." Kia is not holding back on the hyperbole when it comes to its new concept, the HabaNiro. Is it a hot version of the Niro (fnar, fnar)? No, not really. But it might be the first sign that Kia has plans to extend the Niro family beyond a single bodystyle.
Revealed at the New York motor show, the HabaNiro is a Jeep-like concept car, powered by batteries, and claiming a range of more than 500km, plus full level 5 autonomy. It even has Lamborghini-style butterfly doors. In spite of that list of vapourware, Kia says that it's not a 'fanciful' concept, but instead a very serious look ahead at how cars might evolve in the next few years.
"We wanted this concept to be comfortable navigating city streets, carving turns on a coastal road and off-roading with confidence to remote wilderness adventures," said Tom Kearns, vice president of design for Kia Design Center America (KDCA). "We imagined a car for everyone and nearly everything. Then, when we saw the finished product, we were blown away by the imagination of the HabaNiro's creators and its laboratory of technology and we want it in our driveways. Today."
So, it's a compact(ish) crossover, with chunky styling and big 20-inch wheels, plus the requisite short overhangs for off-roading. Ah, but it's more than that, says Kia. In fact, the Korean car maker claims that the HabaNiro is an 'all-electric Everything Car or ECEV' - commuter, crossover, sport utility, state-of-the-art technology workroom and adventure vehicle.
So, you get a striking design that mixes traditional SUV lower body panels, with a very fighter-plane canopy look to the windscreen and glass, plus a distinctive contrast-colour c-pillar picked out in 'Lava Red' (Kia has experimented with something similar on the current Stonic). It may be electric, but it gets a grille, of sorts, which Kia describes as a shark's mouth, full of cooling-blade-like teeth. Satin aluminum skid plates, milled billet aluminium tow hooks, anodised Lava Red aluminium accents, and the embossed HabaNiro name complete the look.
Inside, once you get past the supercar doors, the cabin is almost entirely swathed in that striking Lava Red colour scheme, with only the broad sweep of the dashboard to break things up. That dashboard is a touch-sensitive acrylic that contains all of the functions you'll need to run the car, including the, ahem, Technical Option Sharing System (TOSS) (stop sniggering) which allows you to swipe buttons and displays up from the dash and into the full-width heads-up display windscreen.
There are no air vents, as such, so the HabaNiro gets a slim Perimeter Ventilation System (PVS) that quietly and evenly blows a curtain of air throughout the cabin. There are also ambient lights that shine, in various colours, through a pattern on the floor "creating movement that reflects onto surfaces within the cabin."
When the car's in autonomous mode, the steering wheel retracts and folds away, and you can stream your favourite movies or your latest Netlfix binge onto the heads-up display windscreen.
The car uses Kia's Real-time Emotion Adaptive Driving (R.E.A.D.) which, seriously folks, keeps an eye on your emotions and your physiological responses and tries to adjust the cabin to either calm you down or rev you up as appropriate. It can also track where your eyes are pointed, and when you flick them up to the top of the screen to look at a rear-view mirror - that isn't there, as the HabaNiro doesn't have one - instantly flicks on a display that takes a feed from a rear-facing camera.
As for production potential, Kia's taking the Humphrey Bogart approach: "Maybe not today, but the future is an exciting place and Kia is ready to lead the automotive industry into this spicy world of possibility."