This year Kia is making its first commercial vehicles for sale outside of its domestic market, but although they've gone to great lengths to create a new Kia EV van, there's plenty of scope for making LCVs out of their current range.
The world might be eagerly awaiting the arrival of the new Kia PV5 Cargo and Kia PV5 Passenger vans - not to mention the Kia PV7 and Kia PV9 coming futher down the line - but we reckon these are some models that should get a look-in as well.
From a small EV3 van to the massive Kia Carnival van, let's take a tongue-in-cheek look at what Kia vans they should be making instead.
If you see a Kia EV9 in the flesh you'll understand why we think this would make a great new van.
For starters, it's the size of a house, and although it’s attractively styled, it's already quite boxy like a van in its appearance.
But it's not just the shape and the massive dimensions that makes us want a Kia EV9 van.
As a car it's already got the largest boot space imagineable, with clever folding seats that go down at the touch of a button. With the seats up there's 333 litres of storage, but if you fold the third row seats flat it increases to 828 litres. Drop the second row of seats, so that all the rear seats are flat, and you're up to a massive 1650 litres of storage space. That's 1.65 cubic metres in van talk.
We reckon if you were to take the seats away completely you'd be nudging close to 2 cubic metres if you had a proper load floor. The internal length is also enough to store a Euro pallet as well. It could so easily be a van.
It’s got so much load space, there's even a "frunk" under the bonnet for an extra 52-litres of storage space.
It's not quite up to the dimensions of the Kia PV5 Cargo, and even as a people mover the Kia PV5 Passenger dimensions wipe the floor with it, but there's a lot to like about a possible EV9 van. It even looks good, if they badly edited picture above that we threw together is anything to go by.
It's comfortable, fun to drive, and packed full of gadgets (you can even reverse it in and out of parking spaces using the key fob).
Aside from the price (these things aren't cheap) it would make a fantastic van.
You might not have heard of the Kia Carnival, and you certainly won't have come across a Kia Carnival van before.
This large, 7 or 8 seat passenger car is MPV meets SUV, but our American friends would likely call it a minivan, so it’s already halfway there.
It’s sold globally as the Kia Sedona, and it loved for its practical and spacious interior. It’s not overly pretentious inside either, making it ideal for a proper van.
A Kia Carnival van would be the ultimate incognito city worker too, but thanks to its V6 engine it could also be a bit of a sleeper, ready to blast away at the lights on an important delivery.
Kia Carinval vans could have a genuine place in the world, though.
They'd be a rival to the likes of the Mercedes-Benz Vito, performing as taxis or executive transport in one guise but as fully blown commercial vehicles in another. Sliding side doors, a low entry-height loadspace, it's got all the hallmarks of a decent little conversion.
If fellow Koreans KGM can do it within the confines of the KGM Rexton Commercial dimensions, we see no reason why we can't have a Kia Carnival van. Our digital rendering attempts at a two-tone rear panel, mimicking the car's design don't look too shabby either. Couldn’t you just imagine a livery on there?
There's one catch, though, it's not sold in the UK, so getting one to the body builder for a conversion might make it even more expensive than a Kia EV9.
The latest new car in the Kia range is a compact EV that's winning hearts and minds at every turn. Not least for its price. This could be the budget option in our alternative Kia can range.
Honestly, it's not going to make the best van out there, but if the Ford Fiesta Van can be on sale for the best part of three decades, then why not a compact Kia van.
Plus, the thought of an EV3 Cargo van makes us chuckle, not least because it's actually not as dumb an idea as it sounds.
The boot is large even with the seats in, giving you 460 litres of book space. Fold the EV3's rear seats flat and all of a sudden you've got 1,250 litres or 1.25m3.
As a comparison, the Fiesta Van used to have just under 1m3.
Also, when Kia launched the PBV range of vans at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2024 they showed a concept model called the Kia PV1.
The Kia PV1 was said to be a tiny autonomous cargo van for the modern city. It was going to do all sort of things, from being a mobile office, to scaling purpose built buildings to deliver you your takeaway. At least we think that was the idea, it was all rather silly.
Instead of a PV1, though, wouldn't it be good if Kia converted the EV3 into a van.
It'd make a nice little runabout around the city for a delivery driver. If thousands of BT engineers were able to go around in converted Fiestas and the Vauxhall Corsavan, then an EV3 van is simply a new name for the modern age.
This one is a bit of a fudge, because the Kia Bongo already is a van.
In fact it's not just any old van, it's Kia's longest selling model and its first LCV.
The Kia Bongo has been a roaring success in Korea, and to Korean eyes it's up there with how we see the Ford Transit. It defines the van segment.
Although it's not a car that needs to be made into a van, as such, we could do with a few Kia Bongo's over here, if only as a yardstick to compare the new wave of Kia PBV vans by.
Seeing a Bongo up close, you certainly begin to understand why some elements of the Kia PV5 are how they are. They're not related as such, but there's something in the DNA.
There you have it, a fully-formed new van line-up, ready made (sort of).
From large to small vans our alternative range of Kia cars that could be vans are ready to go…
Or you could just wait until the end of the year for the new Kia van to arrive.
