Everything For Everyone

Spoiler alert: the new Kia Seltos is a fantastic car, and with its many variants and huge features list, you’ll find one to suit your budget and tastes.

- Pablo Chaterji

Before I begin, a disclaimer of sorts. Kia is going to offer the Seltos in a choice of 17 variants to begin with, which is a mindboggling number. Each will have different sets of features, bells and whistles and whatnot, and all 17 will not last the course, given the amount of inventory dealers will have to maintain. To that end, I will only deal with the top-end petrol and diesel automatic variants here, to prevent you (and, more importantly, me) from being confused to kingdom come.

You will know by now that Kia has been tom-tomming the Seltos for over a year, beginning with the SP2i concept it showed at the Auto Expo in 2018. Since then, it has unleashed a veritable blizzard of sketches, teasers, unveils, prototypes, pre-launch drives in both Korea and India and a rather incomprehensible TV commercial featuring Tiger Shroff attempting to interact with a meerkat, all to the effect of being badass or some such (if you have remained untouched by any or all of these communication efforts, kindly let me know where you go to escape from the real world). The danger with this sort of communications blitz is that if your product doesn’t quite live up to all the hype, you’re up the creek minus a paddle. Fortunately for Kia, this is not the case – the Seltos is, in my opinion, possibly the best car that’s been launched so far this year in India, pound for pound, segment for segment.