Stephen Corby’s best electric car of 2024: Kia EV9

Now look, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is such an obvious winner in any judging of the best electric car money could buy in 2024 that it took a rare unanimous gong as the Wheels Car of the Year, despite the fact that I was on the judging panel, and I hate agreeing with people. 

So let’s just acknowledge that, in a world of limitless dollars, that Hyundai is the one EV I would definitely be parking in my fantasy garage and move on to something a little less obvious.

This year, that would be the Kia EV9, a vehicle I admired from afar in terms of its incredibly brave, concept car made real in the proud Audi TT tradition of styling, but did not expect to enjoy driving.

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No vehicle that big – and at more than 5rm long, almost 2m wide and 1.78m high it really is a Large SUV – should be enjoyable to drive, let alone sporty or exciting, and yet the Kia EV9 somehow pulls off the trick of making a style of car that I detest desirable.

Sure, it has issues, mainly the fact that you have to spend $121,000 for the super-fast GT-Line, which is clearly the one any enthusiast whose had too many children and let them buy too many pets and have too many hobbies would go for. And that does sound like a lot for something with a Kia badge, but you might be thinking of the old, less-sexy Kia logo, and the old, slightly fusty Kia design language. 

The Kia EV9 is something else, something new and something surprisingly wonderful.

Biggest EV surprise of 2024: Slowing EV sales

I’m going to have to go with the slump, and the hate. After countless news stories about how EV sales were booming in this country and doubling and exponentially growing and generally being like crypto, the tail-end of 2024 seemed to slam the brakes on the excitement, and hard.

As Kia CEO Damien Meredith pointed out recently, we have definitely reached the end of the early adopter phase, and now the marketeers have hit the hard reality of price, which is to say that a lot of people would like an EV, but they’re too damn expensive. Meredith is confident the cheap Chinese import explosion will fix this problem in time.

Of course, a lot of people do not want an EV either, because they think they’re woke, or they just hate change. Or they’re old. And 99.9 per cent of those people have never driven one, but they don’t need to, because they know they’d hate it.

The anti-electric clamour seems to have been louder and wilder than ever in the past few months, to the point where some media outlets didn’t want to talk about an EV winning Wheels COTY, because they said it would annoy their audience. 

Hopefully the angry boomers will chomp a heap of chill pills this year and we can all just accept the inevitability of a world in which EVs are the dominant motive force.

The electric car I’m most looking forward to in 2025: Porsche 718 EV

It seems simultaneously like sacrilege and the most obvious thing of all time, but the EV it’s hard not to be excited about is the Porsche 718 EV – the all-electric replacement for the brilliant Boxster.

Porsche really is throwing all its chips into the electric fry pan, and the Macan EV has already proven the company knows what it’s doing, while the Taycan has also proven that an electric car can be wildly exciting, and a little frightening.

What excites me most about the 718 is the fact that the Taycan’s one flaw is that it’s too big, too wide, too heavy and has too many doors to be a sports car. The Boxster replacement will fix that.

And apparently they’re going to make the battery stand up, behind the seats, rather than lying down underneath the car, which will help the Porsche 718 EV to exhibit proper mid-engined balance.

If only Porsche would just admit it should have thought of the Ioniq 5’s fake gearbox trick and fit one of its own, that would be something.

But I’m very confident that this time next year I’ll be saying the Porsche was my EV of 2025.