2024 Kia EV9

Tunnel vision is a good thing.

- Alisa Priddle  

South Korea is dotted with mountains that spawned a road network featuring miles of tunnels, so a road trip from Seoul to the Sea of Japan offers a chance to marvel at the engineering behind it. Making the trip in the new Kia EV9 allowed us to also marvel at this family vehicle’s quiet, comfortable ride in the echo chamber of long highway stretches literally bored through rock.

Korean road engineers chose surfaces to reduce noise and vibrations but not ones so smooth that drivers get drowsy. The tunnels have “singing” sections where strips in the concrete are spaced so the vibrations create an actual tune when you drive over them. Inside a 6.8-mile tunnel on the Inje-Yangyang Expressway, which took 50,000 workers eight years to complete, sections of musical road play the first verse of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”