It's a crowded field — the one with the smallish SUVs — and with good reason. They do pretty well on that ever-dearer commodity, gasoline; they aren't so big that they trip over their feet; and they hold just enough for many households' urban and suburban use, both in passengers and cargo.

The one we tested was the Kia Sportage — their top line offering, the EX, with such slightly spiffy extras as heated seats, V6 engine and an overall sense of trying, with some success, to look a bit more upscale than it actually is.

Kia (ENLARGE)

The 2007 Kia Sportage ranges from about $16,000 for a basic two-liter, four-cylinder car (with no A/C), to nearly $23,000 for the FWD six-cylinder EX model. The luxury package (leather, heated front seats, automatic headlights, etc.) is less than $25,000.

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Kia is part of the giant South Korean industrial group controlled by Hyundai, so the Sportage is something of a corporate twin to the Hyundai Tucson. (I sometimes wonder why the different companies build similar models, whose main mission in life seems to be to compete with their corporate cousins. General Motors learned this the hard way, eventually having to close down Oldsmobile, and you'd think other automakers, in this possibly pending age of austerity, might think about slimming down a bit.)

But they haven't, as of this writing, and so we have the Sportage — is it a noun, like reportage, or does it mean "Sport" and "Age," like it's a sporty age, mate?

The Sportage competes with some 26 other small sport utility vehicles, according to the www.edmunds.com Web site, which categorizes all manner of car and SUV known to man. Sportage comes in front-wheel-drive and four-wheel-drive, with models ranging from about $16,000 for a basic two-liter, four-cylinder car (with no air conditioning), to nearly $23,000 for the four-wheel-drive six-cylinder EX model. Our tester rounded out, with the luxury package (leather, heated front seats, automatic headlights, etc.), for less than $25,000, which ain't bad for what you get.

And what do you get?

Taking a giant leaf from the design manual of the Japanese, circa 30 years ago, the Korean manufacturers are, after a few stumbles, producing highly competitive cars that manage to not only stay bolted and welded together but speak a confidence bold enough to allow unheard-of warranty periods of up to 10 years and 100,000 miles for power train. The Sportage, true to that vein, is a tight little econo-SUV. The interior of our Sportage was done up in a clean-looking black leather. The instruments were clear and legible. The stereo system was mercifully simple — knobs on the dashboard, one for volume, one for tuning — and the heating and air conditioning controls were all pretty straightforward.

On the road, the Sportage has just enough spunk, thanks to the 2.7-liter, 173-horsepower V-6 engine, to get into the passing lane without being crushed by the Ford Expedition that is rushing up from behind. It would be nice if Kia could get about 30 more horses into this little power plant, have it crest at least 200 bhp, but perhaps that will come in due time.

As it stands now, the V-6 is pretty audible and not as smooth as, say, the V-6 that Honda uses in its Accords. On the other hand, speaking of Honda, its competitor to the Sportage, the CR-V, comes only with a four-cylinder. Kia offers both four- and six-cylinder variants in the Sportage.

Into each SUV, however, a little bit of different light must fall and so we were taken with the way Kia figured out the cargo cover, something that has become nearly mandatory for SUVs in this somewhat paranoid age.

Instead of having a cover that is either open or closed, the Sportage cover can be opened a bit from the rear, enough to put in a few bags of groceries without opening up the whole shebang to reveal everything else that is back there. And while we're at it, it was also clever of Kia to have a separate lever to open up the top-hinged tailgate window. Makes it easy to drop in those grocery bags, rather than open up the whole tailgate. The other thing that made this one a bit different was the styling: it's not chunky. Kia managed to make the rear end of the car smooth and svelte, which is saying a lot for an SUV.