Pulling its weight: Kia Sportage tops category at What Car? Tow Car Awards 2026

The Kia Sportage has been named ‘Best car for caravans up to 1500kg’ in the annual What Car? Tow Car Awards.

For the 20^th year, What Car? has joined forces with the Camping and Caravanning Club to find, appraise and celebrate Britain’s best cars for towing, testing all cars from small hatchbacks to seven-seat SUVs. The Kia Sportage, which sits in the heavily populated compact-SUV segment, fended off competition to take home a hard-fought category win, adding to its overflowing trophy cabinet.

The testing process combines controlled towing assessments with everyday usability checks to identify the best all-round tow cars. Each vehicle is paired with a Swift caravan loaded to either 85% of the car’s kerb weight, or its maximum towing capacity, and then put through a series of expert-led tests at Horiba-MIRA proving ground. Tests include high-speed stability runs, slalom handling, hill starts, reversing, lane changes, emergency braking and acceleration. Test scores are then balanced with assessments of practicality, safety, value, running costs and standard equipment, ensuring the winning cars excel not only while towing, but in day-to-day driving too.

The vehicle highlighted by What Car? and the Camping and Caravanning Club was the Kia Sportage HEV ‘GT-Line S’ in all-wheel drive (AWD), the variant which crowns the Sportage HEV line-up. With a maximum braked trailer weight of 1,510kg, five seats, and 587 litres of luggage compartment space with all seats in place, the Sportage HEV suits a wide variety of lifestyles with families very much at the heart of its ethos.

Moreover, the 1.6-litre petrol hybrid powertrain allows for combined fuel consumption of 44.1 miles per gallon, showing that economy doesn’t compromise towing capacity.

Steve Huntingford, Editor at What Car?, commented: “Freshly updated with a new look, better tech and more power, the Kia Sportage takes top spot in this class. Whatever quality you value most in a tow car, the Sportage delivers. The Kia is very secure at high speeds and in an emergency swerve. Even in blustery conditions, car and caravan tracked straight and true.”

This award for Sportage follows previous successes at the What Car? Tow Car Awards, with the largest of Kia’s EV family, the EV9, topping the ‘Electric Car (1,201kg+ towing capacity)’ category last year. In preceding years, the largest of Kia’s petrol-powered cars, the Sorento, has also found multiple successes.

The Kia Sportage continues to be an outstanding success for the brand, as Kia’s UK, European and global best-seller. So far this year, the Sportage is the nation’s second best-selling vehicle, with more than 21,000 sales, while it continually jostles for the top spot in the UK charts each month.