Buying a Kia Carnival over a Toyota Innova Crysta

In short, better interiors and stronger performance at a slightly cheaper price due to discounting sealed the deal for me. Finally, my mother really liked the Carnival, although she wouldn't say so for the fear of influencing me such that it impacts my rational thinking.

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Two months back, I bought a Kia Carnival (base variant) because of the Rs. 3.75 lakh discount being offered on it, which made it cheaper to purchase than the Innova Crysta VX - otherwise my preference.

I think there is almost an unwritten rule; all Innova buyers have to upgrade to  a Crysta. I can count at least 5-6 knowns who did exactly that. I was no different. I had gone to the Toyota showroom with the intent of booking a Crysta VX - a formality, in my eyes then, when we thought of making a trip to Kia just to check what was on offer with the Carnival, after being slightly disappointed with the Crysta's interiors and its pricing.

Needless to say, we were very impressed by the Carnival's interiors and who would not like to own a 200 bhp van? So, when the sales advisor put up a quote for the Carnival's base variant which was less than the Crysta's, we seriously started evaluating the Carnival. My big concern was its size, the width specifically and its overall reliability. Did a few test drives to allay our concerns around its size and spent some time on Google researching about its reliability. Turned out that it was a top pick in minivan segment in US by consumer reports in the year 2018 (from what I recall now), it fared the best among minivans in the JD power survey results for a few years and this particular generation was a best seller in Australia, and had a lot of positive reviews for the diesel variant from down under. In addition, the Aussie media or at least some of them reported that Hyundai/Kia along with Mazda were the companies that had little or relatively very less issues with DPF. In short, better interiors and stronger performance at a slightly cheaper price due to discounting sealed the deal for me. Finally, my mother really liked the Carnival, although she wouldn't say so for the fear of influencing me such that it impacts my rational thinking. She is huge on doing long driving holidays with the full family. So this was also a birthday gift to her. Bought it home on her birthday, much to her delight.

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