When you live with a car for any length of time, you begin to stop noticing its individualities and just take them as read.
A sure-fire way to get a different perspective on it is to hand the keys over to someone else for a while, so I swapped wheels with our production editor Tony Rock for a couple of weeks to get an alternate perspective on it.
I’ve mentioned before that the Optima is very appropriate for my kind of driving, which is mainly big miles on A-roads and motorways, but Tony’s the other way around. He lives in south London, so he’s more acutely aware of parking and low-speed manoeuvrability, which was his first point: “I misjudged the length of the car a couple of times, particularly when I was halfway through three-point turns and wondering why people weren’t taking advantage of the space I’ve allowed them to slip through in the past.”
This isn’t the sort of thing you notice out in the sticks, and he has a point. The Kia is large, even by upper medium sector standards, and front parking sensors would be a help for pampered drivers on a car this big.
On the flipside, Tony also took the Optima on a trip to Cornwall and back, which he was impressed to have managed on one tank of diesel.
