2027 Kia Telluride X-Pro Review: The Rare Off-Road Trim That Doesn’t Ruin the SUV

Most off-road trims are a costume. You pay a few thousand extra for knobby tires, some black plastic cladding, and a pair of tow hooks painted a color that screams rescue me, and what you actually get is a family SUV that rides worse, hums louder on the highway, and never once leaves pavement. The 2027 Kia Telluride X-Pro had every opportunity to be exactly that vehicle.

It isn't, and that's the whole story here. Kia redesigned the Telluride from the ground up for 2027, and the X-Pro is the version that gets 9.1 inches of ground clearance, an electronic limited-slip rear differential, real all-terrain rubber, and recovery hooks that aren't decorative. The surprise is what it didn't cost: the thing still drives like the comfortable, quiet, absurdly practical three-row SUV that made the Telluride a phenomenon in the first place. That balance is harder to pull off than the marketing photos suggest, and almost nobody in this class has managed it.

Exterior

The outgoing Telluride was handsome in a restrained, Range-Rover-adjacent way. The new one isn't restrained. It's slab-sided and upright, with a wide black grille, vertical LED lighting signatures stacked at each corner, and a tailgate so flat you could project a movie on it. Flush door handles clean up the profile. Whether you love it probably depends on how you feel about SUVs that look like they were designed with a T-square, but there's no arguing that it reads as more substantial than the truck it replaces.

The X-Pro adds the parts that matter. You get 18-inch black alloy wheels wrapped in 255/60R-18 all-terrain tires, black roof rails, black lower cladding, bright orange recovery points front and rear, and a raised suspension with more travel than the standard car. There's also X-Pro-exclusive ground lighting, which sounds like a gimmick until you're setting up camp in the dark and can actually see where you're putting your feet. Our test car was painted in the Terrain Brown Matte, a finish that looks fantastic in photos and will make you nervous about the first rock chip.

The proportions grew in every useful direction. Wheelbase is up 2.7 inches to 116.9, overall length is up 2.3 inches to 199.2, and the whole thing stands 71.5 inches tall and 78.3 inches wide with the mirrors folded. Curb weight lands at 4,736 pounds. Those numbers matter less as bragging rights than as a promise about the inside, which we'll get to, and about visibility: the boxy greenhouse and upright glass mean you can actually see the corners of this thing, which is not something you can say about most modern SUVs.

Here's the honest note. The X-Pro looks tougher than it is. It's a unibody crossover with a transverse four-cylinder, not a body-on-frame rig, and no amount of orange hardware changes that. But Kia mostly resisted the urge to over-costume it, and the visual upgrades line up with actual mechanical ones.

Interior

Step inside and the jump from the old car is immediate. The materials are a genuine step up, the switchgear feels expensive, and the whole dash is built around a bridge-style console that leaves useful open storage underneath it. It reads as a serious attempt at a luxury cabin in a vehicle that starts well under Acura money, and it mostly gets there.

The seats are the standout. The driver gets Kia's Ergo Motion chair with a massage function and support that holds up over long stretches. Front seats are heated and ventilated. The second-row captain's chairs are heated and ventilated too, and for 2027 Kia offers heated seating in all three rows plus front relaxation seats with powered leg rests. Add the heated steering wheel and a power tilt and telescoping column with memory, and you have a cabin that treats the second row like passengers rather than cargo.

The third row is the part that decides whether a three-row SUV is real, and this one passes. Access is easy, adults fit without negotiation, and there are charging ports and storage cubbies back there instead of a bench and an apology. Cargo runs 22.3 cubic feet behind the third row, 48.7 with it folded, and 89.3 with everything down, on a flat floor with proper tie-downs. There's a household-style power outlet in back, dual wireless charging pads up front, USB-C ports scattered throughout, and rear climate controls.

Kia also went after noise for this generation with an upgraded NVH package, and you notice it. At highway speed the cabin is genuinely quiet, which is not a given when you've bolted all-terrain tires to a two-and-a-half-ton box. Safety equipment expanded too, with a new front-row center airbag bringing the total to ten. It's the rare interior where the spec list and the seat-of-the-pants impression agree.

Performance

The big change is under the hood, and it's the one that will start arguments. The 3.8-liter V6 is gone, replaced by a turbocharged 2.5-liter four making 274 horsepower and 311 lb-ft of torque through an eight-speed automatic. That's 17 hp less than the V6 and 49 lb-ft more, with peak torque arriving at just 1,700 rpm. In practice it means the new Telluride feels stronger in the situations you actually drive in: pulling away from lights, merging, climbing a grade with the family aboard. Zero to 60 comes in around 7.4 seconds, which is fine and not memorable.

On road, the X-Pro is composed rather than exciting. Steering has real weight and directness, body roll is well managed for something this tall, and it corners with more poise than you'd expect from a vehicle riding on knobbies. What it doesn't do is talk to you. Feedback is limited, and if you put it next to a Honda Pilot on a twisty road, the Honda is the more entertaining car. The Telluride's counterargument is that in eighth gear at 75 mph the engine is basically asleep and the cabin is silent, which is what most buyers actually want from 20,000 miles a year.

Off road is where the X-Pro earns its badge. The 9.1 inches of clearance and improved approach angles are supposed to let it walk over obstacles that stop rivals, and the specially tuned off-road traction control should be the real hero. I didn't test off-roading this one, but other reports say that the electronic limited-slip rear diff, the multi-terrain drive modes, and hill descent control all do their jobs.

Fuel economy is...not great. You're getting 17 city, 22 highway, and 19 combined from a 19-gallon tank, which is not good in 2027. Towing is rated at 5,000 pounds, which is competitive, but not class-leading. And the frustrating part: Kia's new turbo hybrid makes 329 hp and 339 lb-ft and returns an EPA-estimated 35 mpg combined, but you can't have it in the X-Pro. The most interesting powertrain and the most interesting trim don't overlap, at least not yet.

Infotainment and Tech

The dashboard is dominated by Kia's ccNC setup: twin 12.3-inch panoramic displays running the gauges and infotainment under one sweep of glass, backed by a 12-inch head-up display. Wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are standard, so most people will mirror their phone and never think about the native interface again. There are dual wireless chargers so the driver and front passenger stop fighting over the pad.

Kia has been busy layering software on top. There's a generative AI voice assistant you wake with "Hey, Kia," Digital Key 2.0 so your iPhone or Galaxy becomes the key, myQ integration for your garage door, and built-in streaming apps including Netflix, Disney+, and YouTube for when the car is parked and the kids are waiting. Top trims get a 14-speaker premium audio system with a 10-inch subwoofer, and it's genuinely good.

The camera suite deserves its own mention because it's the tech that's most useful off pavement. A ground view monitor operates below 6 mph and effectively lets you see through the hood, which is exactly what you want when you're cresting a blind rise or picking a line through a rutted section. Add the surround-view monitor, the digital rearview mirror, and the full stack of driver assists (highway driving assist, navigation-based smart cruise, blind spot and cross traffic avoidance, lane following, parking collision avoidance) and it's about as well-equipped as anything at this price.

That said, it's not all wins. The native navigation is more complicated than it needs to be, with menus that take too many taps to do simple things. The digital gauge graphics are functional but dull, which stings on a screen this large and this prominent. And the head-up display, for all its size, washed out in bright light. None of these are dealbreakers, but they're the difference between a tech package that's competitive and one that's actually best in class.

Conclusion

So who is this for? It's for the person who needs three real rows on Tuesday and a forest service road on Saturday, and who is tired of being told those are different vehicles. Not the hardcore rock crawler (buy a Wrangler or a 4Runner), and not the buyer who just wants the cheapest way to move six people (the LX starts at $39,190 and does that job). The X-Pro is for the family that actually goes places, and it is unusually good at being that.

The price is where it gets interesting. The X-Pro SX-Prestige starts at $56,790, and a loaded example with the matte paint and $1,545 in freight lands right around $59,580. That's real money, and it's roughly $7,865 more than a Hyundai Palisade XRT Pro that shares a lot of hardware. The Kia justifies the gap with a fresher design, a nicer interior, and slightly more consistent off-road behavior, but you should drive both before you sign. Kia's warranty (five years and 60,000 miles bumper to bumper, ten years and 100,000 on the powertrain) helps close the argument, and the thing is built in West Point, Georgia.

The trade-offs are real and worth repeating: 19 mpg combined, no hybrid option on this trim, and a native software experience that's a step behind the hardware it runs on. If fuel economy is your top priority, the hybrid X-Line makes more sense and gives up surprisingly little.

But the reason the X-Pro sticks with you is that it never asks you to pay for its capability on the commute. Most off-road trims hand you a bill every single day for the two weekends a year you use them. This one doesn't. That's a small thing on a spec sheet and a big thing in your driveway.