Byron goes over the 2021 Kia Telluride's infotainment and tech features, which helped earn the Korean automaker Autoblog's Technology of the Year award.
TranscriptBYRON HURD: Hello everybody, it's Byron. I am here in the 2021 Kia Telluride, and we're going to do a little review of the infotainment system and tech inside this fantastic three row crossover. This is Kia's hottest selling car, and the most expensive crossover they build.
It has a great layout, there's a ton of good stuff in here. So let's dive right in. OK. So here we are on the home screen. As you can see we have this nice wide screen layout, which is great for both information display, which is what we've got to doing right now, and actually interacting with the unit. So since we're here at home we don't have a home button, which is how it should be.
You can see we have navigation, audio, and our status. From here we can open up each one of these widgets and expand. The navigation has pinch to zoom, one finger drag. And you have all your typical options down here. And of course you can activate any of these using voice commands, just as well as using the touch interface. So we hit our home button, we go back to the main screen.
As you can see, with these tiles we can swipe left or right. We have Android Auto and Apple CarPlay built in. I believe those are standard, even on the base Telluride. I already showed you that opening up navigation opens its own pane, the same is true for these other ones. And you can see we have these little winglets.
So that we can actually see other tiles from the home screen while we have this window open. So this is a great usability aspect of having this nice wide screen setup. Because we can have our core thing here that we're actually interacting with, we want to change the source, Sirius AM/FM, if we want to manually tune, all that kind of stuff is here. And then we can also have another information panel, or the navigation, whatever you have active, over here.
So that you can access that while you're interacting with whatever it is that you actually need to do. So this is the default layout for the tiles on the home screen; navigation, audio, and information. We can edit those using this. Easily accessible.
Let's say the radio's the thing you interact with most and you want it closest to you, boom, done. You go back to home, now we've got radio, than nav, than weather. The same is true of the icons. And the icons are not clear from what we're seeing here, but those are what you get when you swipe to the left and get this broader menu.
So as it sits we have these 12 options, Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, sounds of nature, which is an ambient sound thing that Kia does. Believe Hyundai does it on their cars as well. And then here we have the kind of miscellaneous items. But let's say you frequently have rear passengers and you want that to be somewhere a little more accessible. Well, edit the icons, . grab your climate control, drag it to this panel, and it will display something onto the back page that we don't use as frequently.
In Setup we have options for just about everything. Some of these are not available to you while you're driving. I'm currently in park, so we have the ability to mess around with quite a few of these. We can access drive mode options, which there's not a whole lot to that in this particular car. Climate, lighting, so on and so forth.
So from this menu, of course, all the typical things you can do. You can turn on or off their surround sound optimization software, the base boost, your good old fashioned EQ, your different sound levels for navigation, parking safety, and all those kinds of things. The ability to mute navigation, which you can do from here. You can also do that from within the nav itself.
Please proceed to the highlighted route, then the route guidance will start.
And so while we're in this menu I'll go ahead and go over a couple of the features that are somewhat unique to this car, or at least unique by name to Kia. One of them is passenger talk. Passenger talk is an option that will actually amplify your voice in the rear seat.
So if you're driving on noisy concrete or something like that, the people in the back seat are having trouble hearing you, you can turn this on. You can probably hear the echo of my voice coming from the rear speakers right now, even on the video. It's a handy little feature if it's going to be a normal thing for you to carry rear seat passengers.
Especially because it means you can talk at a far more reasonable volume and still be heard, rather than having to shout at your children. Which, let's face it, you'll probably have to do anyway. But now it'll be louder.
It's a neat trick.
[NO SPEECH]
And here's one more little neat feature built into this Kia Telluride. The sounds of nature. And you have different options for this. So what this is, is essentially it's ambient sound for you to listen to when you're thinking about choking the driver next to you to death. So ocean waves, rain falling, an open air cafe, fire, probably not the most calming sound to hear in a car when cruising on the highway but, we digress.
I don't even really know what to say about this one. It's the sound of someone stomping through snow. I suppose that's the only sound snow really makes, so I guess there's some degree of sense to that. A lively forest. Yes, sounds lively. And back to our sea waves.
So just one more thing to note here regarding the infotainment system. As you saw in the main display, there are only so many vehicle options available through the touch screen. The rest of them are here in the cluster. As you can see here, this isn't actually a full digital cluster, just the center part. And the left and right gauges there are fixed.
But this does have a relatively full menu. Different things we'll slide through here. But the most important section for our purposes right now is this user settings menu. Which allows you to adjust the head up display, the driver assistance features, which there's quite a bit to this.
Driving assist is probably the key element to this menu, the one most people will want to go in and edit. This is where you can enable and disable things like lane departure warning, lane following, or lane keeping, depending on how you like to refer to it. And highway drive assist, which is the semi self-driving highway system.
Now, this is on by default when you use cruise control. So that's something to keep in mind. If you do not disable it in this menu you will have to live with it whenever you use the cruise control system. There are also things here for how quickly and how long it alerts you when certain bad things happen.
And you have a little bit of granularity with regard to how extensively you want intervention. Safe exit assist, which you probably remember from some of Kia's commercials. Other abilities here are really up to you, personal preferences. You'll probably recognize safe exit assist from some of Hyundai and Kia's commercials. That's the thing that keeps your kids from opening a door into oncoming traffic if it's detected approaching from the rear.
And there are the things that we can get to from here as well. Door settings, lights settings, convenience, there are a lot of things in here that you can fool around with in the convenience menu. A lot of these are things that pop up in the cluster when certain conditions are met. I'll note a few in here, such as the wiper and lights display, basically telling you when you're using them, when you're not.
The gear position pop up, basically tells you in the cluster which position the gear selectors in. Icy road warning, which should come on when the temperature dips low enough for there to be ice on the road. Things like that. Handy little features that some people might find more annoying than useful.
So there's a lot in here, and I'll show you how I'm accessing all of this. It's all on the steering wheel using this little bump switch. It just goes up and down to cycle through the menu. And pressing down on it will select the category you have highlighted.
And then you have this button here with the little menu logo on it that cycles through the various categories in the cluster display. This one's my favorite. Nothing like a digital speedometer. So there you have it.
That's the 2021 Kia Telluride infotainment system. You'll note that we didn't have to cover things like climate control or anything like that. Because those are actually buttons. Crazy, right? There are buttons on the dash the temperature, and the fan speed, and the heated seats.
And I'm going to stop because otherwise I'll go on a rant that nobody wants to hear. Thanks for watching.
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