This time, I ended up in a black-on-black 2nd gen Kia Soul. The guy at the Enterpise counter (who knows me pretty well by now) asked if I'd rather have the Jeep Patriot or the Soul. I explained that he'd be paying me $60 to even sit in the Patriot, nevermind drive it away, so he tossed me the key to the hamstermobile.
The Soul was actually pretty okay. If I HAD to have a compact car and HAD to have something "tall" with a high seating position and a hatchback, I'd be an entirely different person. But if I WERE that person, the Soul wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. At least I think it wouldn't. I've never met that other person and if I did I think I probably wouldn't like him very much.
ANYWAY. The car.
It looked like this:
Basically, it's far from the least pleasant small car I've ever driven, which is probably a compliment of some sort.
Styling
6/10
It's goofy-looking, but not "love-or-hate" polarizing goofy like the Juke. It's pretty conservative while still being different. I don't exactly like it, but I don't really dislike it, either. It is at least tasteful and not riddled with unnecessary creases, curves, and stupidity like so many others. The body lines are clean, panel gaps are fairly consistent, it's a square with rounded corners, and the tail lights are the size of a small continent. Not much more to say.
Interior
7/10
As with the styling, the interior doesn't do a whole lot explicitly WRONG, but it also doesn't try much harder than it has to. It's very average. Being a tall, square car, it feels fairly roomy (but also narrow). The gauge cluster is clean and simple, with white illumination that's easy on the eyes.
The center stack is obnoxiously red-light and a mess of poorly-organized and -chosen buttons. The gauge needles are red-lit, but rimmed with black which for some reason bugged the hell out of my eyes in low-light situations.
The steering wheel has WAY TOO MANY buttons, most of which are absolutely NOT even vaguely approaching being important enough to be within thumbs' reach at any time (trip odometer reset?! Transmission shift mode control?! WTF?!). However, the wheel's hub is atypically small and thin by modern standards, leaving a LOT of open space on the wheel, which gets a big thumbs-up from me.
The most notable aspect of the car's interior: the steering wheel's plastic material is UTTERLY HORRENDOUS. Hard, smooth, and slick. It feels like the $25 Mad Catz racing wheel I used to have for my PS2. My hands were sweatier after 15 minutes of driving in the Soul than they've ever been in my life. It would drive me nuts if it were my daily driver.
The control stalks were covered in too damn many controls, too. They also weren't round, but rather squareish with a single concave face, which means with any functions turned on (rotating the stalk knob) you have an awkward surface to flick for signals, high-beams, etc.)
The radio controls are as terrible as I've come to expect from all modern cars: functions I actually use buried in menus while there are acres of individual buttons dedicated to functions I will never ever need to use. To swich between AM and FM you have to dive through a 3 level menu. There's a "Display" button that doesn't change what's displayed; it turns the display OFF. Yeah. At least I was able to very quickly pair my phone for bluetooth audio with only a couple button presses.
Driver ergonomics are okay, but there's the problem of wheel:pedal positioning ratio that makes an ideal seat distance impossible to find. The shift lever is too low and forward to be useful as a hand-rest (something pretty much ALL new cars have in common). The steering wheel had both telescope and tilt adjust with a LOT of range, but as with nearly every car ever, it doesn't adjust low enough for my taste. That's partly due to the car's upright "commanding" seating arrangement which doesn't exactly cocoon you in the cockpit, but also because it just doesn't arc down very much.
The thing I found the most odd and distracting was visibility out of the car. I'm used to sitting down low in a fairly tall car (the LS8 is new enough that its roofline peaks pretty high, leaving TONS of headroom even above my 6'4'' head). This means a great view out of a vast greenhouse. I expected similar results from the Soul, due to its height, vast stretches of glass, and squareness. I was surprised to find that this was not the case. You sit so high in the Soul that your visibility is mostly downward. I felt awkward passing semi trucks, where my view felt obstructed vertically. With a sunshade deployed to a side window, this feeling increases and one ends up with a bizarre feeling of gunslit windows in a car that really has massive panes of glass all around. Basically: yet another side effect of tall seating that I really dislike a lot.
Powertrain
6.25/10
The little thing gets out of its own way just fine. It has passing power when needed. The 6-speed wasn't excessively prone to downshifting even with all the "economy" settings turned on. (Hey, I had to try it or how would I know?) It felt more refined than average, though the idle was still fairly offensive in terms of both smoothness and sound. Cruise control wasn't particularly adept at maintaining speed on non-level terrain, and waited far too long to downshift for more power when climbing.
I think the biggest standout factor for me is that, driven pretty conservatively with all the "eco" buttons pushed, I managed a round-trip fuel economy of 27.8 MPG. That's ridiculous. This is most definitely NOT an "economy" car. It's just a little one. For a car that tiny, with 6 gears, highway cruise below 3k and eco fuel saving logic built into everything, I expected far, far, far better.
I never tried the manual shift mode, which is probably a solid compliment to the automatic's shift logic in general.
Handling
6/10
It was surprisingly confidence inspiring and competent. Body roll was kept fairly minimal. Not a lot of understeer in normal driving, though I never really pushed it much. Steering was insanely light but quicker than expected. Brakes were perfectly sufficient. It's wouldn't be a frustrating car to drive every day from a handling standpoint, but it isn't remotely rewarding, either. But that's a perfectly acceptable line for a car of its type to follow, and certainly preferable to the Corolla/Elantra approach. Road feel was completely absent, with surface feedback feeling even more numb than even the über-soft tall-sided 225-65 snow tires I currently have on the LS (which are themselves about as communicative as a quadriplegic mime). Made for a nice smooth ride, which is somewhat impressive given the well-controlled body roll in such a small car but, once again, it's not going to get your blood pumping any faster.
Features and extras:
4/10
The car had cruise control, bluetooth, power mirrors, and A/C. It did NOT have an auto-dimming mirror (what a stupid cost-cutting measure! electrochromic mirrors are far more effective at reducing glare while maintaining visibility than prismatic mirrors in my experience).
Other notes:
The cabin was REALLY hard to keep at a constant temp. I'm sure it was largely due to the fact that the car is one enormous flat-sided black cube with greenhouse windows, but it got HOT, even by my standards, and finding a setting that cooled it without overcooling was pretty much impossible. I fiddled with the climate controls more than anything else in the car, and never ever found the sweet spot.
Hilariously, using the rear wiper spray function caused massive amounts of AM-band interference. Clearly, there's some Ford-grade electrical work going on in this thing despite it's badging.
Speaking of the rear wiper, it has 3 speeds and none of them are what I needed. I drove the car during a blizzard through a mountain pass, and through rain after that. The slowest speed is so fast that it streaks the window in light rain, which left me manually triggering it from time to time to maintain my rearward visibility.
It felt quite competent in the snow. I got nailed by a blizzard through Malad (a 5600 foot summit/pass in southern Idaho) which left over an inch of snow on the highway. Other traffic was crawling along at 40 but I felt quite safe at 60 in the Soul. It was not remotely squirrely and felt firmly planted even in the slush and snow.
The door window frames are comically assembled from welded box tubing, with miter welds that look like they were done by first-year tech shop students. You could probably lose an eye to one if not careful. The front windows have a similarly amusing sharp kink in them. Just an odd sight for a guy who is used to driving low sedans with slicked-back A-pillars and arcing front windows.
The headlights were EXCELLENT. High beams were really strong, but the low-beams were perfectly sufficient for most of my middle-of-nowhere, entirely-unlit late-night drive. I didn't feel like I was missing the high beams desperately during stretches where oncoming traffic made them unusable.
Lastly: While the interior illumination dims quite a bit, the turn signal indicators on the gauge cluster do NOT dim along with it. Basically, I got blinded every time I used my signals after dark. They're psychotically over-bright.
Overall:
6.5 out of 10.
It won't make you wish you were driving something else for your typical commute, but it won't inspire you to tell your friends about it, either (unless you're a freaking weirdo like me and enjoy writing reviews of blandmobiles).
