Kia's Lego-Like Concept Vehicles Can Be Almost Anything You Imagine

Kia continues to evolve the Hyundai Motor Group's concept of "purpose-built vehicles," or PBVs, with a trio of concepts debuting at CES 2024. Meet the PV1, PV5 and PV7, the automaker's new Platform Beyond Vehicle family. These electric vans illustrate Kia's vision for a class of vehicles flexible enough to do more than just move people -- they can be customized to move products, serve as work or living spaces, and even be converted to modular pop-up stores and operate with or without a driver behind the wheel.

PV1 is the smallest and most autonomy focused. It doesn't even have a steering wheel. Its small footprint, according to the automaker, makes it best suited for dense urban environments and pedestrian-centric spaces.

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Stepping up in scale is the PV5. This is the most flexible of the trio as demonstrated, appearing in basic, van, high roof, robotaxi and chassis cab pickup configurations in Kia's CES booth. The automaker even showcased what appeared to be a hot-swap process where the PV5 could be converted from one configuration to another in minutes to meet the needs of a specific job. A PV5 could serve as a food truck, delivery van or mobile lounge depending on how it's configured or, with its foldable steering wheel deployed, it could just be an adorable little minivan.

The largest, the PV7, scales up even further beyond the PV5, with more space for cargo and a larger platform that can accommodate larger batteries and more range.

Inside and outside all the PBV concepts, you'll find Kia's modular rail system, which allows even further customization of each of the vans. The rails are designed to work with universal, purpose-designed pods and cargo boxes that can be attached and swapped out like Lego bricks. Large pods filled with cargo could, for example, be loaded onto a PV7 at a distribution center for transport to a city center, where they're transferred to a pack of PV1s for last-mile delivery. A store owner could load products into a pod, which would then fold out to form shelves at a pop-up shop location. A food truck operator could unfold the pods into tables with seating for diners. Kia says the vehicles and the system built around them are extremely flexible.

Even the way the PBVs will be built is flexible. To provide the level of bespoke customization to businesses and individual customers, it plans to build the PBVs using the modular cell-based manufacturing techniques being pioneered at the HMGICS plant that I was able to tour last year. During that expedition, Hyundai Motor Group was firm in its plans to build purpose-built vehicles -- though perhaps not these concepts specifically -- in the very near future.