"It shook off its uncool stigma"

The minivan resurgence story arriving now — sales up 21 percent in 2025 — is actually a rerun of a film the market has already watched twice. Kia's electric van strategy suggests the company has learned the wrong lesson from what killed minivans the first time.

The revival narrative rests on a diagnosis that sounds plausible: families got weary of SUVs, cultural stigma faded. The humble minivan's practicality became visible again. This is the story journalists want to tell because it has momentum, redemption, a cultural shift you can sense in the air. It is also the story that obscures why minivans actually failed.

Minivans didn't lose market share because they were uncool. They lost it because the total cost of ownership. Purchase price, maintenance, and crucially, resale value. Made SUVs rationally cheaper. A Honda CR-V or Toyota Highlander retained value far better than a Chrysler Pacifica. For families replacing a vehicle every seven to ten years, that difference compounded into thousands of dollars. Used-car buyers, the actual constraint, have always been ruthless about this math. They abandoned minivans not from shame but from arithmetic.

Kia's electrification of the minivan inherits this problem and weaponizes it. Battery degradation is something used-car markets have barely begun to price. A five-year-old electric minivan with 60,000 miles enters the market as a vehicle whose battery health is opaque and whose replacement cost is substantial. The first buyers absorb that uncertainty as a discount. That discount is what destroyed minivans before. Just in a different form. The 21 percent uptick may be relief spending after years of crossover sameness, or it may be families discovering that gas minivans suddenly look efficient compared to three-row SUVs. Neither trend suggests Kia's bet on electrification will survive the used-car market's verdict. Is the only verdict that actually matters when you're choosing what your family will own in 2032.

The minivan revival is real. The question Kia is not asking is whether families have suddenly stopped caring about resale value, or whether they've simply forgotten they will care again.