2007 SEMA - Give the Kia brand some Soul

Not so long ago, Kia was known for building some pretty crummy cars. The old Sportage, Sephia, and Spectra were crude and undesirable; they sold by virtue of a low, low price. But that's changed with the company's recent products. The Optima competes well against the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry, the revised Sportage and Rio are competent, and the Sedona is a good minivan let down by so-so reliability.

This history tracks with what Len Hunt, Kia's executive vice president and chief operating officer, has been emphasizing at basically every recent press conference. He said that the company needs to build a reputation for building a car that's decent, and then they'll move on to building a car that's a car that's truly desirable and alluring.

There are some baby steps being taken here at SEMA, basically a Spectra5 "SX" that's lowered, has bigger wheels, and some body modifications. A similarly modified Rondo is parked next to it, looking a bit like a tricked-out Popemobile. More intriguing is the Kia Soul concept; we've seen it before at Detroit, but it's now actually approaching production. The Soul looks like a Scion xB but drawn with a finer-pen, giving it more flowing lines.

There was one note of discord: playing in the background during Hunt's speech was a showroom video (winding roads, smiling people, autumn leaf-lined drives) of a Kia Amanti. When we tested the Amanti, we said it was "the clumsiest-handling sedan we've tested recently..." (available to online subscribers) Recent revisions have improved handling considerably, but the Amanti still remains a Korean interpretation of combining the handling of a mid-1980s Buick interior crossed with the styling of a mid-1990s Mercedes-Benz E-Class.

Seeing that Amanti just goes to show that changing both a brand image and the product line takes time...

—Tom Mutchler

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