Test Drive: 6 Things To Know About the 2014 Kia Soul

One of the biggest things Kia keyed in on was the suspension in the Soul. Although the cars still has Macpherson struts in the front and a torsion beam for the rear, the car now has twin-tube shocks, bigger dampers, bigger bushings, and a front stablizer bar. A new steering box has also been added, along with a 28.7 percent stiffer frame. This all means that bumps matter less, turns are more responsive, and high-speeds are less noticeable (80 mph felt great).

It's pretty interesting that all three of the "box vehicles," the Scion xB, the Nissan Cube and the Kia Soul, are all extremely rounded out these days. They're all based on a square, but it looks like somebody took the blur tool on Photoshop and went to town on all of the edges. For the xB (which has completely lost the feel that it originally had) and the Cube, this softness has completely bloated the exteriors. They look huge. The Soul, however, especially in person, feels pretty compact. The mouth is a little bulbous, and it has a little bit of a booty, but its lines in between are pretty neat. Carried over from the first generation, the canopy look that the darkened A-pillar creates is a cool touch. For a box, it doesn't feel like it's upright stature is too stiff.

This might be harping on a small detail, but this speaker design is something that really stood out to me. Speakers almost always have the same look, but the ones in the Soul face straight up and are combined with the side air vents to make one slotted unit. The sound coming out of them was pretty rich, as well.

The first-generation Soul headlights looked kind of cheap. The recessed look between the two parts looked like they were just kind of inserted into the front end like lego pieces. The new ones are streamlined into the body, they have a multi-layered design that looks much more high-tech and upscale, and the stand-out bulb gives it a stare that it was missing before. The taillights also look much more flush with the car, rather than its own separate part. The black outline on the lights flows into the bigger hatch window, bleeding all the way across the rear. We could have probably done without the floating body-color bar that the lights hug on the hatch, but it's another funky part that makes the car stand out, especially in bright colors.

To give this statement some context, the drive route that we had in San Diego involved lots of highway driving and some pretty harsh elevation changes in the mountains. We were driving the 2.0L I4, which has 164hp, 34 more than the lower 1.6L powertrain, and it was really having a tough time mustering enough enery. And going into the highway, it had pretty much no kick when I floored it on the entrance ramp. Once we were up to speed, it felt good, it was just that getting there felt like a struggle at times. And that's after Kia said that they tuned these new engines for higher low-end torque. Are many people going to be driving the Soul up mountains, though? Probably not.

Maybe it's all the bright colors. Maybe it's the association with the hamsters, maybe it's the heavy use of circles everywhere throughout the interior, we're not exactly sure, but there's just something happy about these cars. The new commercial, with the slimmed down, handsome hamsters might suggest that Kia wants this car to be looked at a little more seriously, but they're still hamsters. Its one of those cars that looks like if you spread your arms atop its hood, it might turn into a cartoon and hug you back. And that's good for the younger demographic. Don't most kids just want a quirky car they can love?