Both the Sorento and Forester have child safety locks to prevent children from opening the rear doors. The Sorento S/EX/SX/Prestige/X-Line has power child safety locks, allowing the driver to activate and deactivate them from the driver's seat and to know when they're engaged. The Forester’s child locks have to be individually engaged at each rear door with a manual switch. The driver can’t know the status of the locks without opening the doors and checking them.
The Sorento Prestige has a standard Surround View Monitor to allow the driver to see objects all around the vehicle on a screen. The Forester only offers a rear monitor and front and rear parking sensors that beep or flash a light. That doesn’t help with obstacles to the sides.
Compared to metal, the Sorento’s plastic fuel tank can withstand harder, more intrusive impacts without leaking; this decreases the possibility of fire. The Subaru Forester has a metal gas tank.
Both the Sorento and the Forester have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front side-impact airbags, driver knee airbags, side-impact head airbags, front seatbelt pretensioners, height adjustable front shoulder belts, four-wheel antilock brakes, traction control, electronic stability systems to prevent skidding, crash mitigating brakes, daytime running lights, lane departure warning systems, rearview cameras, available all wheel drive, blind spot warning systems and rear cross-path warning.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration does side impact tests on new vehicles. In this test, which crashes the vehicle into a post at 20 MPH, results indicate that the Kia Sorento is safer than the Subaru Forester:
|
Sorento |
Forester |
|
Into Pole |
|
STARS |
5 Stars |
5 Stars |
Max Damage Depth |
15 inches |
16 inches |
Spine Acceleration |
32 G’s |
40 G’s |
New test not comparable to pre-2011 test results. More stars = Better. Lower test results = Better.