Kia EV6 review: reliability & safety rating

Kia's seven-year warranty and generally good reliability record have seen it perform well in customer-satisfaction surveys in the past. So despite the EV6 being the first of a new breed of fully zero-emissions models from the brand, we're reasonably confident in predicting a fuss-free ownership experience. Safety is excellent, too – confirmed by a five-star independent evaluation of the car's crashworthiness from Euro NCAP.

Kia EV6 reliability & problems

As mentioned above, Kia and sister brand Hyundai generally tend to have satisfied customers, and two of their models (Hyundai's Kona SUV and Kia's Rio supermini) filled the top two positions in the 2021 Driver Power car ownership survey results table, with Sportage SUV coming home ninth. Kia was also the second-highest-rated brand overall in the same edition of the survey. Combined with electric cars' inherent simplicity compared to petrol or diesel-engined equivalents, it all bodes pretty well for the EV6 to be a dependable car.

In our 2022 survey, Kia finished third overall, with its models locking out six of the top 20 places in our rundown of the top 75 cars to own – a feat repeated by no other manufacturer. It’s something to be hugely proud of, and gives us confidence to suggest that EV6 ownership should be relatively pain-free.

Safety

The closely related Hyundai Ioniq 5 scored a five-star Euro NCAP safety rating in 2021, and the Kia EV6 followed suit a year later. In fact, both car's individual category scores were pretty similar. The EV6 was rated highly for adult occupant protection, child occupant protection and driver assistance features (90%, 86% and 87% respectively), while its pedestrian protection rating was a little lower (63%).

There's plenty of safety kit fitted as standard to ensure you don't come to grief in the first place, such as forward-collision avoidance, hill-start assistance, an intelligent speed limiter, lane-following assistance and lane-keeping assistance.