Kia Wants To Make Its EVs Even Smaller And More Affordable

• Kia confirms interest in making an even smaller electric car than the EV2.
• This new city EV hasn’t received the green light yet, but Kia will likely want a piece of a growing segment where it has only one model, the EV2.
• The EV1 and EV2 could be sold alongside one another, just like Volkswagen plans to do with the ID. Polo and ID. Cross.

Europeans are clearly interested in buying small B-segment electric city cars if they are good and affordable enough. The Renault 5 E-Tech was one of the continent’s top-selling EVs in 2025, but it won’t have it so easy going forward as the segment becomes populated with rivals. Kia is also considering entering the segment with what will presumably be called the EV1, a small city hatchback positioned below the EV2 in its electric lineup.

Seeing the success of cars like the Renault 5, which is a conventional hatchback, not a crossover, as well as the very positive reception for the new Twingo, likely pushed other manufacturers to want to make their own. Kia’s smallest current offering is the EV2, which has a crossover aesthetic, so it’s taller and has a larger footprint, but it still falls within the B-segment or what Europeans call a supermini.

That means Kia can go even smaller and the brand’s European marketing boss confirmed for Autocar that the company is studying the prospect of launching something along the lines of an electric Picanto. David Hilbert explained that “The whole industry is looking at how they make EVs more accessible. Of course we’re doing that as well. We will continue to look at where the opportunities are and, obviously, it’s called EV2 for a reason.”

It’s called EV2 specifically to leave room for an even smaller EV1, which would not only be smaller but also feature a smaller battery that would help bring down its price. The EV2 has a long-range battery option that delivers nearly 280 miles (450 km) on the WLTP test cycle, but that much range really isn’t needed in a small urban runabout that will almost never leave the city.

Kia’s partner Hyundai already offers a sub-4-meter urban-focused EV in Europe, the Inster, but the EV1 likely won’t be mechanically related, since the Inster is just an electric version of the Korean-market Casper city car (which doesn’t have an equivalent Kia model). Both the Inster and the EV2 have a 42-kilowatt-hour battery pack in base form, but it only grows to 49 kWh in the long-range Inster, while the EV2 takes it up to 62 kWh, which is why it has as much range as it does.

Hilbert made it sound like Kia still isn’t convinced it needs to build an EV1 when he said “Longer-term, we continue to study the A-segment. [The] Picanto is still an important model for us, and we continue to have a very important [sales] volume from that.” However, if it could design the car to fit within the European Union’s still-undefined E-car category, which would allow it to drop some active safety features and sell it at a lower price than cars created before the segment was defined, it could give the manufacturer an edge.

The EU is expected to release its E-car regulations by the end of January, and once it does, Kia and other manufacturers will decide if they want to enter the segment or not. Autocar quotes Alex Papapetropoulos, Kia Europe’s product and pricing boss, saying the manufacturer is “looking very closely at what the EU was doing,” referring specifically to E-cars and adding that “I’m not worried, because we have in our product plan the toolkit that allows us to adjust and adapt to whatever is going to be announced.”

The Renault 5 currently has the segment to itself. Current rivals include the aforementioned Inster, the BYD Seagull, the Leapmotor T03, the Dacia Spring, the Kia EV2 and the very keenly priced Citroën ë-C3 and Fiat Grande Panda EV. But the new Renault Twingo E-Tech is just around the corner, as is an even cheaper Dacia EV, which is going to be revealed soon, and even Hyundai is rumored to be working on a model that could be called the Ioniq 2. Volkswagen is also getting ready to launch the ID. Polo and ID. Cross models, meaning the segment is about to become very populated and a lot more competitive.