A few days ago, Kia released studio shots of the new K4 “compact sedan” (as Kia puts it) that got a reaction out of everyone. Some loved how it looked in those images, some thought the C-pillar was bizarre, and others were just waiting to see how it turned out in natural lighting. On New York Auto Show media day, now that Kia’s released more details, one thing’s certain: When it launches this summer, the 2025 Kia K4 will be the biggest compact car in America.
Now, we don’t necessarily mean biggest by sales figures, although since Kia had no issue shifting the Forte, we suspect strong sales to continue with the K4. A roster of features including dual digital displays, a Harman/Kardon stereo, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and available noise-reducing noise-reducing acoustic tires certainly won’t hurt its chances of clawing market share from titans like Toyota and Honda.
No, we’re talking about physical size. The 2025 Kia K4 measures in at 185.4 inches long and 72.8 inches wide, giving it the largest footprint of any compact car today. That’s absolutely huge, and it makes you wonder what the term compact car really means. If you walked into a Kia showroom ten years ago, you’d find that a 2014 Kia Forte sedan was 2.9 inches narrower and a whopping 7.1 inches shorter than the incoming K4. That’s about 7.18 square feet less car, and if that sounds considerable for a compact car, that’s because it is. Crazier still? The Kia K4 may be the largest car in the compact segment, but not by much.
A brand new Honda Civic Sedan clocks in at 184 inches long and 70.9 inches wide, some 4.6 inches longer and one inch wider than the Civic Sedan did a decade ago. The Volkswagen Jetta? That’s even longer than the K4 at 186.5 inches long, but narrower at 70.8 inches wide. Of the current crop, the Toyota Corolla is among the smallest, and even it’s 182.5 inches long and 70.1 inches wide. Our compact cars are a lot less compact than they used to be.
So what the hell is a compact car anyway? Well, let’s use the EPA’s rulebook, which classifies compact cars as having a combined cargo and interior volume of 100 to 109.9 cubic-feet. Under this ruleset, most of today’s compact cars aren’t actually compact. The Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra, Mazda 3, and the Nissan Sentra are all classified as midsize cars, with combined cargo and interior volumes of between 110 and 119.9 cubic-feet. Huh. Alright, let’s try a different definition. Maybe the one used in crash testing is more apt.
Well, yes and no. While NHTSA classifies cars into categories based on curb weight, the compact car curb weight bracket starts at 2,500 pounds and tops out at 2,999 pounds. Although the base Honda Civic LX falls neatly into this category, the mid-range EX trim breaches it with a curb weight of 3,004 pounds. If it seems absurd that a car can go from compact to midsize just by adding a turbocharged engine and some more electronic gadgets, that’s because it is.
If government regulation can’t agree on what a compact car is, that means like many things in life, it’s an arbitrary social norm. Manufacturers have all decided to evolve their compact car nameplates into similar forms in a way that the market is generally okay with, and life goes on. Like the concept of china for special occasions or odd family traditions, the compact car label is now a vestigial trace of when the object it was attached to meant something. There isn’t much compact about today’s compact cars other than that they’re smaller than just about everything else, and is that enough in the real world?
Tiny old garages aren’t getting any bigger, and neither are parking spots or driveways. For urban dwellers, the size of the modern compact car makes it hard to squeeze into the places they need to park. A midsize car in San Francisco or New York? Unless you live in the suburbs, good luck. Oh, and there’s more than just parking that’s grown more taxing. Bigger tires cost more to replace, and for those who attend the church of winter rubber, harder to store. Bigger brake discs cost more than smaller ones, and over time, the running costs for a bigger car add up.
Of course, the other side of this equation is that many compact sedans are now big enough to use as family cars, meaning you might not have to spring for the next model up. The 2025 Kia K4 boasts 38 inches of rear legroom, which is impressive. That’s genuinely family car territory, 2.8 inches more than you get in a Nissan Altima, and identical to what you get in a 2024 Toyota Camry. Unless you want to do one-wheel-peels everywhere you go thanks to a 2.5-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine and an open differential, do you really need to step up to a K5?
Anyway, the 2024 Kia K4 is one big step for the compact car, and one giant leap for Kia. It looks more modern, more feature-full, more upscale than the old Forte, and if its makers can keep pricing low, success is basically guaranteed. However, for those of us who actually like small cars, can we get the K3 here? It’s just the right size, and if the K4 is moving upmarket, the K3 might attract its own crowd of customers.
(Photo credits: Kia, Honda, Volkswagen)
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Yet no space for rear door handles. Fads be fads, I guess…
Wow, that’s wider than my 2021 3 Series and basically the same length.
I’m obsessed with the way this looks, even more so for the also-revealed hatchback. What are the odds we’ll get a K4 GT with the Elantra N’s powertrain?
(Also I see you people calling the hatch a wagon and it’s not! The rear overhand is shortened compared to the sedan, thus hatchback. If it were a wagon overall length would mirror the sedan. Yes I will die on this hill!)
It’s incredibly ugly. Disjointed, and somehow both over styled and and dull. The hatchback/wagon thing looks better, but only because it kills the horrible side profile of the sedan.
I’m struck by dullness here because of the color. The civic in the article is red and the vw is blue and this one is just bleh. That said, I don’t hate.
All I know is they’re also bringing it to the US as a hatchback and that looks great so once that version releases “at a later date” I’ll be taking it for a test drive.
The new Kia K4 sedan is handsome, but holy heck the hatchback version looks fantastic. It’s as if the new design was meant for the 5-door hatch all along and then tweaked for the sedan. The tail lights and C/D pillar treatment really work with the hatchback shape.
It really does. I thought it looked nice as a sedan but as a hatch it’s absolutely gorgeous and I want one yesterday.
I’ve finally come to accept cars always getting bigger generation to generation, it just is the way it is, but what’s depressing now is they killed all the small cars that should be replacing the compacts here in the US.
idk man I think Kia’s are all starting to look like space blaster laser guns turned into cars. I’d take that Honda or VW any day over that overstyled, wet concrete color mess. I’ve already decided that if I ever got tired of maintaining two German cars (which, so far, have been very reliable), I’d get a Civic SI.
When someone’s Big Altima Energy goes too far and eventually totals the Altima, they take that same energy to the local Kia dealer and convert it to Big Kia Energy using the magic of a 7 year loan at 15% interest.
It looks nice? Did you guys post the wrong pics or something?
My 2019 Volvo S60 is classified as a compact car at 187″ x 73″. The interior volume is 94 cu ft interior plus 14 cu ft cargo to get 108 cu ft, so they are using the EPA definition. The 3984 lb curb weight is juuuuust a touch over the 2,999 lb NHTSA cutoff lol. So there you go, according to the EPA my 2 ton, AWD twin-charged luxury sedan is a compact car!! Lol
Are digital numerical tachometers a thing now? That just seems odd (“0.7 x 1000 RPM” in the interior photo) and potentially confusing to an unfamiliar driver, such as a rental customer, when the digital tach and speedo are adjacent to each other.
Back in analog days, the benefit of a needle on a circular tach was that you didn’t have to read it, you could just note the pointer’s position on the dial with a quick glance (e.g. shift at 12:00).
Tach is just a space filler these days. Almost none of those displays can be paired with a manual transmission.
Just Kia, I think. My spouse had a 2023 Kia Niro with the digital tachometer, and it sucked, especially in a hybrid. It was distracting to have the tach keep jumping from 0.0 to wherever the hybrid needed the motor to be. Listen Kia, I didn’t need a tach in that car. I had no problems hearing that rough-ass, gutless 1.6L 4 cyl engine do its best Subaru rumble impression as it struggles to propel that lump around town. Although the tach was helpful to get an exact number on the rpms on the interstate. Above 70 mph it would randomly downshift and have the engine roaring at 3400+ rpm (sorry, 3.4 x 1000 lol) for long stretches of time. The gas engine was so weak that it needed to do that to recharge the hybrid battery pack, as just cruising on the highway would deplete the battery. Sometimes it would run the engine that way for over 10 minutes at a time. Always had to add oil after long highway trips. What a total waste of money and time that POS car was, glad it is gone.
Where we live the KIA brand is stealing from the Nissan dealers.
As such there are a ton of former Altima drivers in them.
And most of them drive like friggin idiots.
I once walked into a KIA dealership by mistake.
Not gonna do that again, ever.
I love kia’s designs these days. But after owning a telluride for a little over two years, I can never own a kia again. The dealer experience is so bad, it isn’t worth it, and since we didn’t trust the car after a few times it left us stranded, it had to go. Never again, even though every time I see them I get interested. Hell, I even love the rio.
But I need to treat myself with some level of respect and not do that to my future self.
Sorry about that. Their dealers really suck…
… huge compact … oxymoron much?
Why did the K4 get bigger? Because the K5 will be toast soon. It seems automakers are settling on larger compacts holding down the non-electrified ICE sedan market as non-luxury large and mid-sizers are discontinued down to what will probably only be the Camry and Accord in a few years. Any other sedans mid sized or larger will likely be on the HEV/PHEV/EV spectrum.
This is a big problem right here with almost anything new, and the secret challenge is width. The houses on our street were all built in 1926; we are, I’m pretty sure, the only ones on the street who even try to park a car in our garage, though that has as much to do with a lack of closet space inside the houses as anything else.
As it happens, my ’87 Saab 900 fits pretty well in a 1926 garage. It’s almost exactly an inch shorter than this new Kia, but the key is that it is fully six inches narrower. I’ve also gotten my E39 wagon (about four inches longer, but two inches narrower than the Kia) and my former Alltrack (five inches shorter, again two inches narrower than the Kia) into the garage, but those have been uncomfortable, fold-in-the-mirrors-first experiences.
Hell, even our driveway. The current standard curb cut width for a single-car driveway is 96″; ours is 80″. That means this Kia would give me a margin for error of less than 4″ per side.
And they just announced it’s coming to the US as a hatchback too.
It’s funny that the Elantra gets a hybrid but the K4(nee Forte) still doesn’t. The hatch in hybrid form would be a great DD
Because the Niro is the Kia hybrid option in that size class, where as the Hyundai Kona is only ICE or EV they haven’t offered the Forte as a HEV on the Kia side unlike the size up Tucson and Sportage on the cuv side and there used to be both an optima and sonata hybrid though only the sonata is currently available as a hybrid
Very true, I keep forgetting that Kia positions the Niro to fill the K4/K5/Soul/Seltos hybrid hole.
If we rewind a few decades ago, Camry/Accord/Tempo/Corsica/Altima/etc. were classified as compacts, some borderline midsize, and similar in many of the exterior dimensions as this and others today. It’s more some of the nameplates grew into different “classes.” A Civic was still classified as a subcompact by the EPA until the 7th generation. But even then it’s much more recent that exterior size really aligns with the class, a Taurus or Lumina were much larger than an Accord for years but they were still in the same ‘class.’ Trunk space can also nudge a car up, that actually puts the Civic hatch into large car status with the EPA.
(Edit: also will add…even that 2014 Forte was considered a midsize by the EPA as was the Elantra, and the Sonata was classified as a large car.)
I like the K4 much more in the actual photos than in the preview shots they showed before. No more manual as of now which the GT still had with the 1.6T, although it is interesting that it’s referred to as the GT-Line Turbo now. A hybrid would have been easy since the Elantra offers one, but Kia seems more hybrid-averse in sedans vs. Hyundai, perhaps because of the Niro.
The big news is the hatch is back! For Americans anyway, since Canada still got it, but a pleasant surprise.
Hybrid hatch would be great, but I think you’re right that the Niro fills that slot
I’d love to hear Adrian’s take on the design. I know he’s not a fan of hidden rear door handles, but what about the rest? Does it pass muster, or get the MST3K “It Stinks!” seal of disapproval?
Funny, I was sitting in traffic next to a new Civic today and noticed just how big it looked.
It’s nice to see images of what will inevitably be my Lyft ride in a year or so.
IT’S HIDEOUS.
And the lights on the very corners of what used to be known as “bumpers” will be targets for stupid-expensive repairs – zero regard for the limited-income/bad-credit people who purchase ICE KIAs.
At least the wagon is more attractive and practical – but those dropped lights….
Dang, my last-gen Sorento complete with seating for seven (and no cargo) was 187.4” x 74.4”.
I remember talking about how its footprint was very close to the ‘12 Sonata it replaced but dang, the compacts are basically there now.
This thing is 20 inches longer than things like the Soul, Renegade, Golf, Corolla (hatchback). It’s not a compact car. It’s longer than a Prius and BARELY shorter than a Camry. It’s a midsized sedan.
I think it looks great inside and out, though.
Are KIA and Hyundai going to continue to model share the K4 (Forte) and the Elantra, and does this mean a new Elantra with whatever design language Hyundai is using this season? Not a knock I love a lot of what they are doing these days.
Doesn’t matter how good it is. It is still a sedan, and those are increasingly sales-proof these days…
Check this out: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a60319670/kia-k4-hatchback-confirmed/
thank you for that. The hatchback version fixes everything I don’t like about the sedan in the styling arena. That K4 shooting brake is a real looker!
Wo wo wo, it’s definitely not a shooting brake!
Definitely not, but I like the look. I’ve generally panned hidden door handles, but they really work in this case
I checked out the hatchback again and the rear D-Pillar is way too thick and the side glass is too long to ape a shooting brake 2-door wagon style. The rear window C-pillar is not helping even being black-framed.
Not sure it’s ever been done on a 4-door, but the only way to make this shooting brake-esque is making the rear and 3/4 window flush together via frameless rear windows. You have to really, really hide those rear doors (R55 Clubman passenger side internally framed for example)
Sedans still sell very well in Kia’s domestic market
Ding ding! And this is the reason too why the hatch looks exactly like the sedan right up past the rear doors. Clearly the sedan was designed first.