Kia Seltos Showcases Brilliant Off-road Capabilities - VIDEO

by Harish Kumar | 22/12/2020
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This Kia Seltos doesn’t mind going off the seamless roads to showcase how brilliant it is when it comes to the off-road talents. Read on to know what happens.

Kia Seltos is not an off-road purpose-built sports utility vehicle. That’s true. In the Indian auto space, the Kia Seltos is merely a 2WD road-going SUV that barely jumps out from the flat and smooth tarmac surface. So, terms like off-roading capabilities, approach, departure or breakover angles don’t often refer to the Seltos – the largest-selling urban mid-size SUV from the house of Kia. However, this Kia Seltos doesn’t mind going off the seamless roads to showcase how brilliant it is when it comes to the off-road talents. Read on to know what happens.

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The Kia Seltos featured in the video above is not an India-spec car. In fact, this video shows a US-spec Seltos going down a steep incline. The left-hand-drive Seltos SUV managed to come down the slope smoothly without paying much effort. No parts of the car like the underbody, front bumper and rear section were spotted touching the ground.

The fact that the Kia Seltos handles the steep slope easily impresses us very much, given it a non-offroader. The angle between the front bumper and the road or known as the approach angle is pretty large when the Seltos reached the incline or climbed over it.  It is worth noting that the larger the approach angle is, the better the car can perform on the off-road challenges like climbing up/down the ramp.

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The breakover angle, on the other hand, also helps much in the performance here. For the initiated, the breakover angle is made up by the tyre and the centre of the car. Normally, vehicles with short wheelbases will get shorter breakover angles. That of the vehicles with longer wheelbases, on the contrary, is much shallower. The short-wheelbase vehicles can even get stuck when going over the large hump or down to a decline. That’s the reason why most of the off-road-focused vehicles like the all-new Mahindra Thar is always built with a shorter wheelbase that helps reduce its break-over angles.

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The same goes to the departure angle which is made up by the rear bumper and the ground. When you drive the car from a steep decline to a plane surface, the large departure angle ensures that the car’s rear bumper doesn’t touch the ground, thereby avoid getting scrapped. The Kia Seltos here gets a proportionate departure angle that’s why the bumper of the SUV remains clear from the ground.

kia seltos going down incline image

On the roads filled with potholes and speed-breakers in India, using the vehicle with decent amounts of approach, departure and break-over angles is much comfortable. The Kia Seltos turns out to be one of them. Still, you should keep in mind that the Seltos seen in the video is from the US so it is quite different from the model sold in our country when it comes to the features or so. However, the dimensions of the two are almost the same so we do expect the Indian-spec Seltos can be able to do just the same in similar circumstances. If you know any case of the Seltos doing off-road like this one, kindly let IndianAuto know.

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