2022 Kia Cerato Sport+ review

All-round accomplishment doesn’t draw the limelight quite as brightly as heroics. It’s why the Kia Cerato cruises under most radars despite amalgamating various virtues that meet more needs than wants. If you’re after decent space, equipment, safety, ownership credentials and general competency and you really, really can’t stomach the me-too SUV format, the small Korean – in sedan or hatchback form – makes a shrewd alternative for the pragmatically minded.

The Cerato Sport+, tested here in four-door form, is perhaps the recently updated range’s most sensible proposition. The penultimate variant piles on appointments found in the broader Cerato menu by stops short of the GT’s performance pretensions and the turbocharged, dual-clutched, multilink-suspended and athletically styled indulgence of the flagship.

And the ‘plus’ bit means it shoehorns the broadest available safety suite as standard that’s otherwise optional downstream in the range.

61

The four-door also manages to mask stigmatic small-sedan doldrums with a curvaceous silhouette and, besides, trainspotting reveals it offers a markedly larger boot (502L plays 428L) than its trendier liftback twin.

With the left-brain buzzing, the Sport+ sedan presents itself with enough ‘just fine’ in enough areas to convince that it’s the finest Cerato of the current, recently facelifted crop. Or so it appears on virtual paper…  

Pricing and Features

61

The Sport+ lists for $31,140 before on-road costs in either four- or five-door guise, a price point that has been a near-constantly moving target since this generation first lobbed in 2018, when it was over five grand more affordable.

At the time of writing, the national drive-away offer is $33,190 sans options, of which there’s an extra $520 sting for fancy paintwork.

Pricier, then, is perhaps not excessively so. The Kia sails beyond a Toyota Corolla SX sedan ($28,890) if sitting level-pegged with its Korean cousin, the Hyundai i30 Elite ($31,190). As an SUV substitute, a Cerato Sport+ is $2100 more affordable than Kia’s Seltos Sport Plus ($33,290) with a similar drivetrain. All prices before on-road costs.

The Sport+ is underpinned by the same naturally aspirated, torsion-beamed underpinnings as more affordable S and Sport versions if, of course, topped with fulsome garnish.

61

Outside, fitment includes 17-inch alloys (with the Safety Pack’s larger rear brakes), dusk-sensing halogen headlights, LED daytime running lights, front and rear parking sensors, power-folding mirrors and not much that can’t be had on the more affordable regular Sport.

The cabin, though, gets Plus exclusives such as keyless entry and go, leather-appointed trim with front seat heating, dual-zone climate control and an electro-chromatic rear-view mirror.

Every Cerato grade bar the entry S gets Kia’s high-spec 10.25-inch infotainment system featuring sat-nav, DAB+, wired Apple CarPlay and Android Auto and the ever-curious Sounds of Nature ambient noise effects as a sort of occasional-use novelty trick. Thankfully the glitch-prone wireless smartphone mirroring offered in the base variant has been omitted from the range’s upper reaches. 

With the left-brain buzzing, the Sport+ sedan presents itself with enough ‘just fine’ in enough areas to convince that it’s the finest Cerato of the current crop

61

Apart from paint, options are limited to the Safety Pack suite, commanding an extra $1500 in S and Sport but bundled into the Plus as standard. With it comes auto emergency braking with pedestrian and cyclist detection, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring, rear cross-traffic alert and safe exit warning.

Exclusive to the Plus (and GT) are both blind-spot and rear cross-traffic collision avoidance protocols. Active lane-keeping and lane following is standard right throughout the Cerato line-up. It’s a shame, however, that LED headlights offered on the GT are absent from the Plus features list.

The Cerato is a range of split merit in the eyes and clipboards of ANCAP; hatch and sedan versions fitted with the Safety Pack get five stars, those without get four. That said, all and sundry fit front, side and curtain airbags.

Comfort and Space

61

The cabin is classic and familiar Kia, neat and austere with nothing too funky or too adventurous, minted in the marque’s penchant for dark grey with flashes of frosted silver and piano black, all of it a little too conspicuously plasticky to lift itself too upmarket.

Not much has changed since this generation lobbed in 2018 bar the revised Kia logo on the horn cap, though the bright and colourful 10.25-inch screen and small touches such as the electric park brake and updated TFT driver’s screen do lift general presentation nicely.

It’s … fine. The ergonomics are sound, it’s an intuitive cabin design to negotiate, the seats are comfy and supportive enough to neither wow nor annoy. The perforated seat trim is hardy and not very supple, but it looks tidy enough. It’s a cabin fit-out offering flashes of niceness (seat heating) in an execution that otherwise constantly reminds that it’s primarily out to cover fundamental bases (mechanical seat adjustment with no lumbar support control).

61

Still, it’s a tactile cabin with soft surfaces around the dash and door trims, pleasant touchpoints, a quality feel to the controls and switchgear and a good sense of general solidity. Plasticky though the presentation might be, it looks and feels well-built, right down to the quality of exterior paintwork.

Infotainment, too, is large, crisp, fetching and easy to use, its colourful display adding a splash of interest to the cabin’s otherwise stolid colour scheme. The lack of inductive charging isn’t a big issue given the wired smartphone mirroring, which is a messier if ultimately more reliable connection than the wireless format also offered across the Kia (and Hyundai) ranges. 

It’s a tactile cabin with soft surfaces around the dash and door trims, pleasant touchpoints, a quality feel to the controls and switchgear and a good sense of general solidity

61

Row two offers decent leg and shoulder room, making for a comfortable four-adult prospect with enough room for five at a pinch. The sloping roofline, however, does restrict headroom a bit and will have taller occupants brushing their heads against the ceiling. Comfort in the flat-backed seat is adequate though hardly rave-worthy while rear air vents and a sole USB outlet covers fundamental rear-passenger appointments. 

The 502-litre boot space is nice and deep, with proportions generous enough to swallow large bulky objects, while the rear seatback splits 60:40 for a bit of added load-through practicality. There’s a space-saver spare under the floor, in a housing suspiciously large enough to house a full-sized wheel.

On the Road

61

In short, the naturally aspirated 2.0-litre four and six-speed auto powertrain is workmanlike and adequate for tasks that don’t want for large doses of enthusiasm. But nor is anything wrong with it. In fact, the marriage of the MPi four (not the Smartstream unit offered overseas) and torque-converter slushbox is quite a smooth and rosy one, with more inherent cooperation and refinement than most of the dual-clutch-specced powertrains kicking around the Asian mainstream.

With a lukewarm 112kW and its 192Nm peak perched up at 4000rpm, the two-litre is no pulse-raiser and yet, somewhat surprisingly, it does almost everything it needs to. Response is crisp, the transmission is alert, and it musters up more enthusiasm than you initially expect, only becoming slightly gruff once you trounce on it and which is rarely called for around town.

Its consumption, faithful and impressively unwavering mid-eights across balance real-world motoring, is fine enough. And on a diet of crappy 91RON if you choose

61

On the open road, though, it can get caught labouring in kickdown during valiant attempts to overtake a B-double or when called to merge swiftly into fast-moving gaps.

This powertrain fits the bill, or at least the realistic bill for the Sport+'s pitch and purpose. Its consumption, advertised at 7.4L/100 combined and delivering a faithful and impressively unwavering mid-eights across a balance of real-world motoring, is fine enough. And on a diet of crappy 91RON if you choose.

The drive is, like much of the rest of the package, competent if largely unremarkable. It points faithfully and is easy to judge and place on the road, which had better be with a degree of accuracy lest you encounter a fight from Kia’s sensitive lane-keeping and lane-centring smarts.

This remains the one area most Korean machinery calibrations seem genuinely uncomfortable when subjected to the usually unkempt and sometimes hostile Aussie hot-mix landscape.

61

Ride comfort is patchy. Essentially, the primary ride is decent, slightly firm if with enough pliancy to round out large and sharp hits, though it often doesn’t seem so because the suspension is so noisy and thumpy when asked to serve its task. Not helping is that the secondary ride is more fidgety than it really needs to be, as if to inject some terse sportiness purely for vibe’s sake.

The by-product is a suspension tune that’s generally quite composed but, in its main shortfall, suddenly becomes unrefined when confronted by road acne. It’s an ever-present and underlying sensation that might’ve otherwise been masked to some degree by the absence of the prominent amount of tyre noise the Cerato drums up loudly across various road surfaces.

Ownership

61

The Cerato comes with Kia’s excellent seven-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty with ongoing roadside assistance provided you keep servicing with Kia.

Service intervals are 12 months or 15,000 kilometres, whichever comes first, totalling $2939 over its price-capped seven-year/105,000km duration, which averages out to just under $420 per year. For an uncomplicated mechanical package, that’s kind of pricey.

VERDICT

61

The Kia Cerato Sport+ is decent in enough areas to mark its territory as a solid all-rounder. But while the four-door doesn’t do anything badly, it doesn’t really assert itself confidently in any area among a small passenger car segment that’s making forward strides, regardless of its wider popularity.

It faces fresher (Hyundai i30 Sedan), sportier (Ford Focus ST), more premium (Mazda 3), cheaper to buy and own (Toyota Corolla) competition and fails to offer a key point of difference (as per the all-paw Subaru Impreza).

What's more, this comes at a creeping price point that no longer looks quite as value-laden as it was just a few years ago when Cerato was considerably more affordable.

2022 Kia Cerato Sport+ sedan specifications