Kia EV3 Wins a Second Award in Two Months as Bay Area Journalists Name It Best EV
Western Automotive Journalists gave the EV3 GT-Line AWD its Best EV trophy after two days in Sonoma County. The award lands a month after the small SUV reached dealers.
Kia's smallest electric SUV has collected another trophy. Western Automotive Journalists, a nonprofit group of auto writers in the San Francisco Bay Area, named the 2027 Kia EV3 GT-Line AWD its Best EV at the 2026 Best of the Bay awards, Kia America said on Tuesday. It is the second award for the EV3 since September, when it was named Green Car of the Year before a single car had reached a U.S. dealer.
This time the jurors actually drove it. WAJ members spent two days testing the field on roads in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, and the EV3 came out ahead of larger and pricier electric vehicles, according to Kia. The group hands out awards in six categories: Best EV, Best Car, Best Compact SUV, Best Luxury SUV, Best Supercar, and Best Overall.
The winning trim is not the cheap one. The GT-Line AWD carries a $43,490 MSRP, or $44,985 with Kia's $1,495 destination charge, and is rated at 280 miles by the EPA. That is $13,600 more than the 221-mile Light FWD that anchors the lineup at $31,385, and 41 miles short of the 321-mile front-drive versions. All EV3s share a 400-volt architecture with a native NACS port; Kia quotes about 31 minutes for a 10-to-80 percent charge on a 150-kW DC fast charger.
What else was in the running
Kia's release doesn't say which EVs the EV3 beat. Clean Fleet Report, whose editor sits on the WAJ jury, listed the other winners: the Mazda CX-30 2.5 Turbo took both Best Overall and Best Compact SUV, the electric Lexus ES 500e won Best Car, the Hyundai Palisade Calligraphy was named Best Luxury SUV, and the McLaren Artura took Best Supercar. So an EV did win a second category, just not the one named for EVs.
Last year's Best of the Bay went a different direction. The 2025 Best Overall award, as reported by the Tri-City Voice, was the Jeep Wagoneer S, a midsize electric SUV, while the sub-$50,000 class went to the Subaru Solterra.
WAJ president Charlie Vogelheim said every juror who drove the EV3 came away pleased, singling out the design and the way the cabin is laid out. One juror's line, quoted in Kia's release, was that driving the EV3 "feels like entertainment."
Why the timing matters for Kia
The EV3 is only a month into its U.S. run, and the early numbers are moving. Kia sold 976 EV3s in October, according to its monthly sales report, up from 514 in September, the first full month on sale. That is still a small share of a record 80,008-vehicle October for the brand, but combined with the EV6 and EV9 it pushed Kia's electrified sales up 112 percent year over year, after a third quarter in which its EV sales fell 37 percent.
Regional media awards don't move the needle the way a Car and Driver 10Best nod does, and Kia has been collecting them steadily this fall; the Telluride Hybrid and K4 hatchback took Northwest honors in September. What this one adds is a drive-based verdict from a jury that compared the EV3 directly against other 2026 EVs on the same roads. For a car whose base trim gets outranged by both the Chevrolet Bolt and the Nissan Leaf, that is a more useful endorsement than a trophy handed out on paper.
Kia hasn't said which other EVs were in the WAJ field, and WAJ hasn't published its scoring. The full release is on PR Newswire.
