2025 Kia K4 Makes You Wonder Why Other Cars Are So Expensive

New cars are absurdly expensive these days. Some folks will point to the fact that they're filled with more tech and safety equipment than ever before, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the average new car buyer will spend nearly $50,000 on a new ride. Not all of us have that type of money, of course, but it doesn't mean we don't deserve nice things like a car with a warranty. Enter the 2025 Kia K4.

This little sedan replaced the Forte for the 2025 model year, and it's already proving to be a hit by being Kia's second-best-selling vehicle right now, only a few thousand units behind the Sportage crossover. It's easy to see why. The K4 is downright cheap for today's car buying world. Hell, it's even cheap when you compare its closest competition, like the Honda Civic ($25,745) and Toyota Corolla ($23,520). Still, it offers a whole lot of standard tech, safety equipment and funky looks for a way less than 30 grand.

Full Disclosure: Kia lent me a K4 with a full tank of gas to do with as I pleased for a week.

Kia took a big swing when designing the K4. It's a giant step away from the rather conventional-looking Forte it replaced. Not everyone loves its strange angles, wacky lighting design and hidden rear door handles, but that's okay. I think it looks neat, and it certainly helps the K4 stand out from a crowd of rather mundane-looking compact econoboxes. The car I drove was finished off in Kia's lovely Morning Haze green color with some very sharp 17-inch wheels (16s come as standard).

The interior of the K4 is slightly more conventional-looking than the outside. Like most of Kia's offerings, it's dominated by dual 12.3-inch screens that make up the gauge cluster and infotainment display. The center screen is fairly customizable and easy to navigate. There are a few different gauge themes to choose from, but I do wish you could add more information or a map to the cluster. It's a small nitpick, but one worth bringing up,

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In a bit of weirdness, there's a little five-inch panel between the two screens that serves as the HVAC display and contains some of the climate controls (others are located under the center touchscreen). From my driving position, it's a bit hard to see, but your results may vary. In a very conventional move, there's no weird shifter to be found inside the K4. You get a traditional PRND gear selector, which is actually sort of refreshing these days.

The seats you get, even on this mid-grade EX trim, are very comfy cloth units. I drove this car back and forth to Washington, D.C., and I never once felt any sort of back ache — something that's very rare for me. Sadly, they're not heated and cooled, as Kia saves that for the higher trim K4s. The material choices are also quite solid. You're not going to find much, if any, piano black, and all of the plastic you do see feels very nice for the price point.

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Tech-wise, the EX trim also gets you a wireless charger, a very advanced safety suite and a ton of refinement for an incredibly reasonable price. There's also plenty of room inside the K4. Kia says it's the widest sedan in its class, and who doesn't love some extra girth? Because of its 185.4 inches of length, the K4 has 38 inches of legroom for the rear passengers and a fairly generous 14.6 cubic foot trunk out back. If that's not enough, you can always drop the rear seats.

Nobody who buys a Kia K4 is going to give a damn about how it drives, but if you're a sicko like me (which I think you are), you're still going to be curious. Well, it drives like room-temperature oatmeal. It's fine, but it's never going to light a fire in your belly. It's not supposed to. Kia very clearly had zero sporting ambitions when it designed the K4. Maybe the turbocharged model is different, but I've only driven the naturally aspirated K4.

The engine is good enough, but equally uninspiring. It's a little 2.0-liter inline-4 that puts out an adequate-at-best 147 horsepower and 132 pound-feet of torque. All of that power is routed through a continuously variable automatic transmission to both front wheels. Enthralling, I know. It's still enough power to get this 2,987-pound sedan from zero to 60 mph in 8.6 seconds. That's not fast by any stretch of the imagination, but it's enough to get you going on a highway on-ramp for sure.

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The highway is really where the K4 excels since it's very clearly set up for cruising rather than driving fun. In the corners, it's very wallowy and soft, which really is what you want in a simple commuter car like this. It certainly doesn't feel sloppy, but there's not much engagement. Steering feel is pretty much the same story. You're not getting much out of it, and you shouldn't expect it, anyway. The CVT does a really good job of making the motor fall to the background, and it still has eight fake gears if you're a weirdo who is into that sort of thing.

You'd think that little four-cylinder would be noisy on the highway, but the CVT and sound deadening in the cabin keep both engine and road noise in check. It feels like a far more expensive car in terms of refinement than it actually is, and the K4 certainly has a leg up on other class competitors like the Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla and Nissan Sentra in that regard.

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The highway is also where you can use the K4's excellent adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping assist systems. Sure, this is one of the cheapest Kias you can buy, but the Korean automaker didn't decontent its best piece of software for budget buyers, making those features standard on every trim. It's little things like that which really set the K4 apart from everything else — even cars in higher classes.

You also get Hyundai's excellent safety suite that comes with all of the assists, radar systems and alerts you could want out of a car that costs three or four times as much as this mid-level Kia. It's meant to make driving more relaxing, just like the sound deadening that keeps the outside, well, outside.

During my one week and 516 miles of testing in the K4, I found it to be a really good little sedan, one that punches far above its weight class when it comes to tech and refinement. Sure, it's not much of a driver's car, but do you really want it to be? Is that really necessary? We've got enough regular cars that pretend to be sporty. What we need is more regular cars that cosplay with a little luxury.

It gives you a hell of a lot of techy goodness and funky styling for a very reasonable as-tested price of $25,320, including destination. If you feel you're still wanting more (like a more powerful motor or heated/cooled seats), you can always step up to the K4 GT-Line Turbo, which starts at $29,265. At the very bottom of the lineup is the K4 LX. That starts at a measly $23,165, but you still get a ton of the aforementioned tech as standard at that level.

The K4 shows that Kia is very serious about keeping the cheap sedan market alive. It also shows that when it comes to value for money, Kia is still the king of the automotive jungle.

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