2021 Kia Carnival (Sedona) review: Better than an SUV, for most people

This report is a full review and buyer's guide for the new 2021 Kia Carnival (which is called a Sedona in North America). To prove a point on versatility, I jammed a full-sized refrigerator in the back and moved it to the new Fat Cave.

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The Kia Carnival you will see swallowing the fridge was a V6 petrol Platinum. And it’s, like, fully loaded. It’s not cheap, at about $68,000, but I would, frankly, drop the extra $2000 on the diesel.

I think the diesel is better value. It’s just more relaxed and less thirsty, and you don’t need to boot it that hard to get better performance in normal driving situations. And if you’ve got $68,000, you can probably find $70,000 if there’s a good reason.

Anyway, I’ve got this quaint philosophy that these media evaluation cars are supposed to have a hard life. There’s no point testing one like it’s a new baby, right? But at the same time, it’s not OK to damage one arbitrarily just because it’s not yours, and you do this all the time.

So my acid test is: Would you do ‘whatever’ with the vehicle if it were your own? And, yeah - I would jam that big fridge into my own Carnival, no problem.

And I get it that this is A) not a delivery van, and B) a reasonably expensive thing, but if the Platinum is too rich, there’s always the SLI, which is hardly ‘poverty’ - and it’ll save you about $8000.

With Carnival you essentially get eight seats for the price of a seven-seat SUV (ish) and the access for passengers is phenomenally better, thanks in part to those two huge sliding doors.

And if you only need seven seats, the middle seat of row two un-clips and you can store it somewhere in your fat cave. And when you do that, it means you can walk through to row three - which is kind of a big deal if you’ve got two child restraints installed for the kids, and you’re on your way to collect their septuagenarian grandparents so all three generations of you can argue on the way to lunch somewhere scenic.

If you want to do this in a seven-seat SUV (the ‘walk through’ thing) grandma and grandpa either have to do the whole ‘Seal Team Six’ bit and hurdle row two, or you get to work up a sweat removing and re-fitting those kiddie seats, every time everyone gets in or out, in the pouring rain...

I suppose you can also walk through to row three in a seven-seat Hyundai Palisade - but it’s about $3000 more expensive, and you have to tick the box for seven seats if you want to do this in a Palisade. You can’t ever fit eight people on board if you do that. And if you tick the box for eight seats, you can’t ever just walk through, because Palisade lacks Carnival’s ‘now you see it; now you don’t’ trick with the centre seat from row two.

Kia’s done a great job building a better mousetrap with this latest generation Carnival. It’s a real step up from its predecessor, which was also excellent before being let go. This Carnival is the best ‘not quite an SUV’ that a heap more SUV buyers should buy, but won’t.