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It's only been a few months into its U.S. market introduction and Kia is already rolling out special editions of its hipster Soul people mover. Meet the Denim Edition, the first in what is anticipated to be a long line of special edition Souls.
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Kia is recalling about 140,000 vehicles from model years 2006 and 2007, due to a defect that may case brake lights to malfunction.
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At the 2009 New York Auto Show today, Kia unveiled its new Kia Forte Koup adding a two-door variant to its Forte lineup that will hit dealerships later this year. Kia says that the Forte Koup will compete with the Honda Civic Coupe, Ford Focus Coupe and the Chevrolet Cobalt Coupe.
The two-door model is built on a front-wheel-drive unibody frame just like the sedan. It sits on an independent front suspension with MacPherson struts and stabilizer bar along with a torsion beam rear suspension with struts and coil springs. When the Kia Forte Koup hits dealerships, it will be available in two trim-levels including EX and SX. The entry level EX is powered by a 2.0L DOHC 4-cylinder engine making 156-hp and
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The Seoul Motor Show in Korea was the first to see Kia remove the cloth from the 2010 Sorento CUV. The new 2010 Kia Sorento has undergone surgery, where it was totally redesigned by Peter Schreyer, the Chief Design Officer for Kia.
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Spore. Beer Pong. Flight of the Conchords. Superpoking on Facebook. Any of these sound remotely familiar? If not, it's because you're old and unhip. These terms belong in the vernacular of a specific subset of the American populace.
Whether you call them Gen Y, Echo Boomers, or Millennials, they're the next generation of young drivers and car buyers-and they are different from you and me. They grew up not on Atari or Commodore64, nor even Nintendo or SEGA, but on PlayStation and Xbox. They Google, Yelp, and Twitter -- often while simultaneously LOLing on IM or downloading the latest iPhone apps. See? Unhip.
Toyota is not only a student of this generation, it's at the head of the class when it comes to identifying and codifying their existence. Toyota wrote the playbook back in 2004, when it launched the Scion brand and unleashed the xA and xB twins. Four years later, when Scion replaced the xA with xD and brought a larger, more powerful xB to market, it was regarded as the auto industry's most successful youth brand.
Naturally other auto manufacturers, like Kia and Nissan, took notice, particularly as the xB became the poster box of Scion's youth-targeted movement. So are their new boxy offerings CliffsNotes versions of the xB, merely clever cribbed summaries based on Scion source material? That's what we aim to find out.
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With the small car category gaining strength, more and more automakers are looking to make their pint-size offerings stand out from the masses.
Based on the entry-level Rio, Kia's brand-new 2010 Soul fits this mold well, its heavy revisions allowing it to compete with the squarish likes of the Scion xB and the Nissan Cube, not to mention the less funky progenitor of the modern box cars, the Honda Element.
We recently tested a top-of-the-line Kia Soul Sport to see how it stacks up to its competition from Nissan and Scion (which we conveniently had in the office simultaneously).
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