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Take note that all Carnivals come with two-side facing benches in the rear as standard. Now that would be a 10-seater Carnival, but with considerable compromise in comfort. You’ll have to pay more for the front-facing seats. The advantage of the Carnival is that the separate front seats allow for a “walk-through space” in between. Meaning, mom can check on the kids without exiting and re-entering the van. The big dilemma in the Kia is who to relegate to the back row. There’s a bar that runs across the ceiling just over the rear seat and because of that even a 170-cm adult (5 ft-7 in) will find his hair scraping the headliner. Watch out for humps! Kids should be just fine in the back seat. Ingress and egress are easy for either van, because of their large dual sliding doors. The Venture has a slight advantage because the middle row can slide forward as well as fold its seatback. Luggage We’ll have to declare no contest on this one. With all seats up, the Carnival has almost no luggage space. The Venture has a vast expanse that can swallow all your belongings for a long voyage, even if you’re going camping. Perhaps the best trait of the Venture is that it doesn’t make you choose between people and luggage. Most vans including Starex, Space Gear and yes, the Carnival, have close to zero luggage space when all the seats are up. With a full load of people, the Venture has plenty of room left over for their stuff. We tried doing a little bit of shopping with all rows of seats up and configured for maximum legroom. A surprising amount of stuff still fit in the luggage bay, including a cooler, books, groceries, even a small Christmas tree! If you need even more luggage room, such as on a trip to the airport, just slide the rear row forward a bit using the conveniently-located lever at its base. Legroom is still adequate, and now you’ll be able to fit as many as five full-sized suitcases! You can even remove the middle and rear seats without any tools, but actually lifting them out would be easier if you had Schwarzenegger’s biceps. The Carnival’s last row does fold and tumble forward, and frees up a large amount of luggage space. However, you’d now be able to seat only five. Driving Performance and Ergonomics The Venture has another ace up its sleeve, or rather in its engine bay. A 3.0 liter V6 engine pumps out 171 bhp and a massive 345 Nm of torque. (The torque is more than double a Corolla Altis 1.6’s.) Given those figures, the acceleration is not as immediate as you’d imagine, probably due to the automatic transmission. Sometimes you’d have to wait about 1 or 2 seconds for the acceleration to arrive. When it does arrive, however, hang on! The vehicle surges forward with a vengeance, and you’ll have enough torque on tap to overtake a GTi or two. As for slowing the whole thing down, the four-wheel disc brakes with ABS effectively bring to a halt all 1900 kg of van. Highway blasts aside, we extensively drove the Venture where it will probably be used the most: the usual family haunts of Metro Manila. We drove into mall parking garages, up hotel driveways, jammed it into parking lots and jostled with the thickest Manila traffic. |
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