Kia Venga Review (2009-2019)
Kia Venga cars for sale
3.0
Expert review
Pros
Versatile family-friendly cabin
Some of the original seven-year warranty should still cover recent examples
Generous kit on all models bar the entry-level '1'
Cons
Dull to drive
Disappointing fuel economy
More reliability issues than you'd expect of a Kia
The CarGurus verdict
The great shame of the Kia Venga is that it isn’t better to drive. Small family cars don’t need to behave like sports cars, of course, but the Venga’s engines require determined encouragement to deliver even modest performance, its steering is vague, its body roll prodigious, and its ride quality unsettled. Other Kias are better than this, but more importantly, so are the Venga’s rivals.
The Venga delivers room, and lots of it, for passengers and luggage, and its back seats are really clever. Standard equipment levels are generous, especially if you can stretch to a 3 or a 4, and the fact that the Venga was on sale in the UK for 10 years suggests its attractions outweigh its drawbacks.
The Venga looks like a regular small hatchback, albeit a tall one, but its spacious and versatile cabin qualifies it as a mini-MPV. It easily accommodates four adults with generous headroom and legroom and, while it’s a bit of a squeeze in the rear with a third passenger in the middle, it’s not uncomfortable. The front seats are mounted quite high and upright, aiding the view from behind the steering wheel, which older owners appreciate. They also commend the Venga’s comparatively low sills, which make sliding in and out much easier.
The rear bench is a 60:40 split-folding arrangement, and the outermost seating positions have reclining backrests for passengers who fancy a kip. Both sections of the rear bench slide fore and aft – separately or as a single unit – allowing either greater legroom or boot space. The rear seat backs fold flat for hauling larger items, opening up a gargantuan 1,253 litres, and the boot floor panel can be set at two heights, the highest position of which creates underfloor storage. Even when the boot is at its smallest configuration it boasts a whopping 440 litres of space – 550 when you slide the back seats forwards – and its practicality is boosted by a low loading lip, wide opening and flat boot sides.
It's let down by cheap, hard plastics used for the facia and door trims, which scratch and scuff easily and can end up looking shabby, although Kia made some improvements in this department when the Venga was facelifted in 2015.
The Venga is available with 1.4 and 1.6-litre petrol and diesel engines, none of which are perky performers. The 1.4-litre petrol is the weakest; it has the same 89bhp as the 1.4 CRDi EcoDynamics turbodiesel, but it lacks the diesel’s mid-range torque and struggles if the car is fully laden. The 123bhp 1.6-litre petrol is adequately energetic, and the 1.6 CRDi the most relaxed of the line-up and better for longer trips and higher mileages, but all the Venga’s engines are noisy when revved.
Other dynamic disappointments include the ride and handling. Owners complain that the Venga is bumpy, especially at low speeds around town, and although the steering is light, it’s devoid of feel, and when you tackle a corner even at a very modest speed the Venga rolls excessively. Sure, it’s not a racing car, but it could do better.
Standard equipment levels are generous on all bar the basic trim level, known as the 1, which doesn’t have much to speak of beyond electric front windows and mirrors.
The 2 is far from short of kit, though, including alloy wheels, an iPod cable, Bluetooth, rear electric windows, folding door mirrors, and reversing sensors. The 3 adds climate control, front fog lamps, privacy glass, and cruise control with a speed limiter, and a touchscreen infotainment system with satnav. A top-end 4 trim level was introduced with the 2015 facelift, which added a keyless engine start/stop button, and a panoramic sunroof.
The running cost that vexes Kia Venga owners the most is how much fuel their car uses compared with the official fuel consumption figures. Even the most positive owner reviews of the Venga include the caveat that their car is thirsty: ‘it drinks like a 3.0-litre car but accelerates like a 1.0-litre’ was one owner’s opinion of his 1.6-litre automatic.
The 1.4 CRDi turbodiesel has an official combined figure of 64mpg, which is far better, but real-world consumption is more likely to be in the mid 50s. Several owners report seldom achieving better than 35mpg from their 1.4 petrol, when it’s claimed to give up to 50mpg.
Service intervals for the diesel engines are every 20,000 miles, the petrols every 10,000 miles, but all of them require servicing annually. If you’ve bought a fairly new car then there may still be some free servicing left over from the original owner’s three- or five-year service plan if they bought one. The seven-year, 100,000-mile warranty is also transferrable, which has the potential to save you money if something major goes wrong.
Insurance should be reasonable, with the Venga range spanning groups 8 to 14.
As a brand, Kia tends to do very well in independent reliability surveys – it came ninth out of 30 manufacturers in the 2021 What Car? reliability survey – and the Venga doesn’t sully that reputation, but that’s not to say it’s perfect.
There was an annoying issue with the 1.4-litre CRDi turbodiesel engine. When you prodded the throttle, there was a delay in the car actually accelerating, and a reduction in power. This was random and didn’t affect all cars, and it took Kia about three years to admit there even was an issue, following pressure from owners all over Europe. The eventual fix was a software upgrade, and while most 1.4 Vengas should have had this carried out by now, some may have slipped through the net. If you’re concerned about your car’s performance in this respect, get in touch with a Kia dealer with your VIN number and ask them to check.
There are also reports about the 1.4 CRDi making a ‘chattering’ sound. Some owners have been informed that ‘they all do that’, but others have traced the noise to faulty fuel injectors and an ECU issue. There’s now a theory that the injectors have an eight-year lifespan, so make sure the car you’re looking at runs smoothly.
Another ongoing issue concerns the Venga’s ISG system, or Intelligent Stop & Go: it seems it’s not so intelligent. Intended to improve the urban fuel consumption and reduce CO2 emissions of Vengas with a manual gearbox, ISG automatically turns off the engine when the car is out of gear and your foot is off the clutch. Depress the clutch and the engine fires up again. Except that the ISG system seems to work very rarely.
Rattles from the dashboard have upset some owners, and wind noise from the panoramic sunroof has irked others. Front brake pads rattling in their calipers are sometimes a source of irritation, and there have been a few reports of the gear lever on the automatic becoming stiff or sticking in place, due to a stretched gear cable. Starter motors are now starting to fail, as are door lock actuators, and broken front suspension springs are becoming more common. The tops of the rear doors are known to rust, starting underneath the rubber seal.
- The cosmetic end of the 2015 facelift involved sharpening up the Venga’s nose and tail, together with a raft of other revisions that included better quality cabin materials, a couple of new paint colours and some different alloy wheel designs. On-board tyre pressure monitoring (TPM) became standard across the range, and for some models, there were improvements to the satnav and infotainment systems, including a seven-inch colour touchscreen and full MP3 player compatibility with aux-in and USB ports.
- Less than 12 months after the Venga’s 2015 facelift, Kia introduced a new and much-needed six-speed automatic gearbox, which, like its four-speed predecessor, is available only with the 1.6-litre petrol engine. The four-speed auto is flawed: its gearchanges are clunky, its kickdown savage, it’s prone to holding too high a gear when climbing hills, and it wrecks the fuel economy. The six-speed auto is a massive improvement in almost all areas.
- There are two little oddities in the trim line-up that fall outside of the 1-4 nomenclature. The 1 Air sits between 1 and 2 and adds air conditioning – that’s it. The SR7 trim level was introduced in 2014 and sits between the 1 Air and the 2, as a sort of limited edition. It’s all a bit confusing and, honestly, we’d just go for a 2, a 3 or a 4.
- The best all-rounder: Assuming you’re not buying it purely for urban use, which doesn’t suit diesels, the 1.6-litre CRDi has enough muscle to haul a fully-laden Venga down the motorway without fuss, and returns reasonable fuel economy. As for trim levels, try to stretch to a post-facelift 3.
- The safest: All Vengas enjoy the maximum five-star EuroNCAP crash test rating, but post-facelift models have six airbags – front, side and curtains – and there are also active front headrests and ISOFIX mounts for child seats in the rear. Electronic stability control and ABS are standard, as is hill start assistance, and many models are equipped with daytime running lights.
- All the bells and whistles: As it’s the range-topper, Kia made sure that the Venga 4 groans under the weight of its standard equipment, and those produced after December 2015 are the ones to look out for. The infotainment system features a 1Gb hard drive and they were sold with seven years of free annual upgrades for the satnav’s European maps.
