Kia has officially entered the traditional hot hatch market today at the Chicago Auto Show with the 2014 Kia Forte 5-door. Based on, you guessed it, the redesigned Kia Forte sedan, the four-door-plus-hatch seems to have Volkswagen’s Golf in its sights with an optional 1.6L direct-injection turbocharged engine good for 201 horsepower. Kia has yet to release full details but with 201 ponies and a curb weight likely to be under 3,000lbs, it should give VW a run for their Euros.
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Kia slipped their new Cadenza sedan into their booth in Chicago. Our launch invitation apparently got lost in the mail because this is the first time a TTAC writer has seen one in the flesh. Based on the Hyindai Azera the Cadenza isn’t the RWD Kia flagship so any have been drooling over. Instead it is one step up from the Optima and the only way to get a V6 under the hood of your Kia sedan. Fit and finish looked excellent and the sedan certainly strikes an unexpectedly elegant pose at Kia’s booth. I hit up the Kia PR folks for a tester and they have promised to deliver, check back for a review when that happens. In the meantime, click past the jump for the gallery.
The stupidly named Kia pro_cee’d is going to get the Hyundai Veloster Turbo’s 1.6L 201-horsepower turbocharged 4-cylinder engine as part of a GT trim level. The GT will bow at the Geneva Auto Show – which TTAC won’t be covering, since the Swiss Franc’s relative strength will make even an espresso unaffordable.
The important question for North American consumers – will we get a Forte with this powertrain? Or an Elantra GT? We’ve heard hints from Hyundai that an upgraded engine is in the cards for the hatchback. This seems like an obvious choice.
Today, we’re going to talk rebadges. I know what you’re thinking: a TTAC post about rebadges. Here comes an assault on General Motors. You can almost hear the GM PR department groaning, except for the recently departed Joel Ewanick, who doesn’t have time to groan because he’s too busy putting out a garage fire. But I’m going to leave GM out of this. Mostly. Instead, I’m going to focus on some of the more obscure rebadges from the last few decades. They were all badly conceived. Most were poorly executed. And none of them should’ve happened.
It’s time to make a confession to the good folks at TTAC.
The mileage game is rigged.
How so? Well, approximately two-thirds of the vehicles that reach the 300k+ mark at an auction I attend will usually belong in one of four categories.
Could one of the Detroit auto makers blown the whistle on Hyundai and Kia’s mileage figures? Automotive News seems to think so.
Despite being attacked in some circles as symbols of American decadance, the compact crossover is rapidly gaining in popularity. French business outlet La Tribune reports that sales of small crossovers are up 25 percent this year, with crossovers of all sizes now accounting for 10 percent of the car market.
TTAC readers know that this site has an unhealthy fascination with low-cost cars. It’s not entirely unjustified, what with the segment booming in recession-plagued Europe and the fact that low-cost vehicles are cannibalizing the sales of larger, more conventional vehicles.
The Kia Cerato is already on sale in world markets, but we’ll be getting our first taste of it, in the form of the Forte.
Expect a three-car lineup, similar to the Elantra, with a hatchback and even a coupe model. No word on whether the hatch is based off the Cerato, or the European Cee’d.
The 2012 Los Angeles Auto Show is upon us, and as usual, TTAC will have photographers in the field, complete with live shots of all the new debuts, while we provide anger-tinged appraisals of all the new debuts. Press days don’t start for another couple of days, but we’ve got a rundown of what to expect after the jump.
MG, now owned by Chinese auto maker SAIC, is apparently gunning for Kia and beyond. But despite their lofty ambitions, MG hasn’t made much headway in the automotive world.
So the Halloween Hooptiefest 24 Hours of LeMons at New Hampshire Motors Speedway went well, with the Rust In The Wind Saab-powered Nissan 300ZX taking a very improbable overall win, and we of the LeMons HQ crew were packing up the gear on Sunday afternoon and getting ready to head home… when we heard that all of our flights out of Logan— in fact, all flights out of the northeastern United States— were canceled due to ZOMG THE END OF THE WORLD IS COMING PANIC YALL!!!1! The plan had been to drive our rental Kia Sorento 70 miles or so to an airport hotel, spend the night there, and grab our flights early Monday morning. We got to the hotel in Burlington, Massachusetts, where we convened an emergency meeting of the very exhausted LeMons brain trust. (Read More…)
Slovakia is part of the euro zone. While whole countries need to be bailed out or go bankrupt, the town of Zilina is peaceful – and busy. At the Kia plant, more than 253,000 cee’d, Venga and Sportage models have rolled off the assembly lines, more than the plant made all last year, Reuters says. (Read More…)
Well, we knew this one was inevitable. A compliant filed in Ohio court against Hyundai and Kia due to their overly optimistic fuel economy claims.
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