Last week my wife and I picked my mom up from the airport in Seoul-Incheon and went on a week-long tour of the Korean Peninsula. This trip took us from Seoul all the way to the East Coast beach town of Gangnueng, down to the exuberantly unashamed penis garden called Haesindang – the phallus statues were erected in honor of a virgin who died while awaiting the arrival of her well-endowed fiancée – and then across to the traditional village and gourmet dining in Andong. After that, we checked out the gorgeous views of Daechung Lake in Cheongju before bebopping into Daejeon, a generally quiet city of 1.3 million folks where I officially received my PhD. 

After the graduation, we drove back up to Seoul where I dropped everybody off at Seoul-Incheon International Airport. The entire trip was about 900 miles and involved putting three adults with a ton of luggage inside a rental car for a week. The rental car I chose for this task was the mighty Kia Morning (Picanto in most of the rest of the world).

This absolute beast has a 72 horsepower, 1 liter, 3 cylinder engine, a four speed automatic transmission, seats for four people in comfort or five in a pinch, and possesses a hatchback we used the absolute hell out of.  It weighs a little bit under 2,000 lbs, has a strut front suspension, a twistbeam out back, and 175/65/r14 tires on deluxe steel wheels. It retails new for a little bit less than $10,000 US – or at least that’s how the currency converts using Korean prices. It also qualifies for the “kyeong-cha” class in Korea, which is a special tax, parking, and toll bracket for small vehicles. The most recent vehicle available in the US of roughly the same size is probably either a Mazda 2 or a Ford Fiesta. Regardless, kyeong-cha status cut all my toll road expenses by half and made it possible to get 7 days of rental for a total price of around $230.

I’ll admit I was a little nervous when it came time to put my family and all their stuff into a very small car. But then I remembered that the Kia Morning is a hatchback and that hatchbacks make excellent pickup trucks. My wife sat up front and enjoyed enough space to dance along to her favorite classically trained musician, my mom sat behind her and was comfortable enough to nap, and I slid in behind the wheel hardly believing how much shoulder room Kia engineers managed to shove inside. 

That said, the Kia Morning is far from luxurious. Where higher end cars marketed to discerning consumers cover massive swaths of interior in the finest piano black plastics and most supple Italian touch screens, the lowly Morning makes do with soft-touch plastics, breathable fabrics, a plethora of physical controls that vulgarians might call “satisfying” or “solid,” and a frankly appalling lack of touch screens. Where a truly luxurious machine like the BMW X5 or Mercedes GLE pampers the driver with the opportunity to curse into his own crotch while navigating a sub-sub menu located next to his knee every time he wants to turn on the air conditioner, the cheap and tacky Morning interior made due with physical buttons. These included all radio controls, the fan, the heater and air conditioner controls, the power windows, the buttons for defeating traction control and the automatic lane assist, wipers, and handsfree phone. The controls for the intermittent wiper controls were particularly offensive and tacky.

Not only is this assembly solid and pleasing to use, the switches for timing the wipers or operating the fog lights can be accessed from either the front or the back of the control stalk. All of these distinct tactile sensations, clear labels, and logical placements gave me shockingly few excuses to take my eyes off the tedium of the road. Indeed, the only touchscreen in the entire car was the navigation system, and that was mounted high on the dash where the driver could maintain visibility. The seats as well were incredibly comfortable in a totally boring way. The manual adjustments were light and easy to make, the ergonomic design made most adjustments unnecessary, and the knobs and handles were in such easy to reach places that you could get comfortable in less than ten seconds. If Kia knew luxury, they’d know that the truly premium experience involves reading the owner’s manual, decoding abstract symbols on hidden buttons (or better yet sub menus in the touch screen), and wondering if the seat is not responding because you’ve screwed up or because it’s broken. Bonus points if the power of the luxury seat is great enough to literally kill small children.

While there was a digital instrument cluster of such elegance and futuristic appeal you could hardly read it, this slapped-on veneer of sophistication was nowhere near enough to rescue the experience. The entire car felt nothing at all like driving an iPhone or Lincoln Navigator, and I think I speak for us all when I say that’s unacceptable for a rental costing almost $35 per day.

Beyond the interior, the little Kia’s drivetrain surprised me. I would have expected a 1.0 liter triple making 72 horsepower and dragging three adults with their luggage to struggle with Korea’s mountainous terrain. Surprisingly, that just wasn’t the case. Hills and mountain passes would pass by at a touch over 4,000 rpm in third gear, gliding along at 70 mph with a little bit of power left in reserve if I decided I wanted to do 71 mph. On the downhill or flat, it would shift up a gear and putz along at 2,900 rpm. The little triple was glass smooth with a broad powerband that was adequate everywhere and borderline peppy between 3,800 and 6,000 rpm. It was also incredibly quiet, which surprised me for being such a budget offering.

The four speed automatic was also a pleasant surprise. It was clearly designed to cheat the fuel economy tests and would, as such, sometimes lug the engine. This was annoying. However, it was much less prone to hunting gears and getting confused than most of the other modern automatics I’ve tried. My hunch is that with only four choices, the ECU simply had fewer chances to screw up. While the Morning would have been significantly more fun, more economical, and faster with the available five speed manual, the slushbox was much more competent than normal. I averaged 42 mpg in mixed driving, and people generally do about 10% better with the stick shift version.

That said, we should remember that the Morning is far below the standard of a truly luxurious experience. Compared to the 8 speed automatic I sampled in a Genesis GV80 luxury SUV, the humble Morning drivetrain lacked the capacity to surprise. Where the luxury SUV would delight its driver by randomly ignoring manual commands and, upon the application of throttle, dramatically jump from 7th to 2nd in an almighty downshift that would have the engine slamming into the rev limiter, the Morning was depressingly predictable and unobtrusive. It didn’t even amuse its driver with the jerky locking and unlocking of its torque converter as is characteristic of many higher end vehicles.

An examination of the Morning’s chassis and safety betrays yet more examples of Kia’s tedious obsession with merely practical matters. Ooh, wow, it’s a tiny car that gets a 4 star Euro Ncap crash rating. Big woop. Oh my gosh, it uses high strength steel to keep the weight under 2000 lbs. Golly gee, it manages to have excellent NVH and ride quality due to excellent chassis rigidity. Fucking nerds.

What Kia engineers comprehensively fail to understand is that safety in itself doesn’t sell. What really makes a vehicle feel safe is the idea that, in a crash, you have a good chance to kill the enemy driver or pedestrian. If Kia really wanted to pump up the premium feel in the Morning, they would triple the weight, jack it up a foot and a half, and aim the bumper so that it points at other motorists’ heads in a collision.

In addition to the underwhelming safety feelings, the Morning disappoints the luxury buyer by providing actual steering feel and accuracy. Electric steering racks are supposed to numb and comfort drivers, harkening back to the sensations provided by 1990s era arcade racing game steering wheels. Unwanted feedback and annoying levels of precision distract the driver from the one measly touch screen and threaten to engage him in the boredom of driving.

This, along with the rigid chassis and light weight, combine to make the Morning a surprisingly competent handler even on 14 inch wheels with fat sidewalls. An engineering team more aware of true luxury would have understood that handling should be the consequence of expensive, low profile tires and huge, heavy wheels. Nothing says premium like feeling 150 lbs of unsprung weight crushing an apex and nothing says cheap like knowing you can get new tires for 50 dollars a pop. The Picante has also won several awards for reliability and service costs, which rob the luxury buyer of the chance to demonstrate her classy and exclusive lifestyle to tow truck drivers. This overall plebian cheapness probably explains why so many people race the damned things. Grassrootsmotorsports – ick. More like Povertymotorsports.

That said, not everything is bad about the Morning. It does have active lane assist. This assists you to swerve unpredictably whenever the lines on the road get ambiguous. While I loved this feature, my wife and my mother both preferred we stop playing “Jesus take the wheel,” and the system remained defeated even after multiple times turning the car on and off. Likewise, nothing says luxury like the knowledge a major corporation is telling Sam Altman your pooping schedule, and the Kia does come with basic spyware. However, Kia lacks the commitment to shut the car down when you block the spy cameras, and the little Morning’s data collection devices don’t seem that hard to defeat.

All in all, the Kia Morning is a spiritually bad car. The continual sacrifices the engineers made in the name of chassis rigidity, safety, NVH, comfort, cost, packaging, serviceability, durability, fuel economy, and driving dynamics ruined any chance it had to be a utility vehicle with a fastback roofline, an offroader with low profile 22 inch wheels, a family car no family can afford, or a rolling smartphone so distracting you no longer notice that you’re mowing down pedestrians. Thank heavens we have luxury alternatives.