Kia refreshes Sportage, Picanto models in move towards higher quality
Author: David Miles
Published: 04 November 2007
Following the successful introduction of the European designed and built cee’d five door hatchback and cee’d SW estate ranges, Kia is on a roll with the introduction this week of the revised Sportage SUV five-door models, with two and four wheel drive variants, and the revised Picanto small five-door hatchbacks.
Like their cee’d models the revised Sportage is now built in Europe at Zilina, Slovakia and the models now carry Kia’s industry leading seven-year, 100,000-mile bumper-to-bumper warranty for their European manufactured models.
Production of the refreshed Picanto models remains in Korea but there are no plans to provide Kia models built outside Europe with the seven-year warranty. There is the possibility of the three-year cover for Korean built models being increased to five-years in the not too distant future.
New Kia Sportage
New Kia Sportage models with 2.0-litre CRDi diesel engines go on sale in the UK immediately, petrol models with 2.0 and 2.7-litre engines go on sale in January. Prices for two-wheel drive variants start at under £14,000 and four-wheel drive variants at under £15,000.
The revised range has XE, XS and TITAN levels of specification and there is the option of an automatic transmission for two wheel drive 2.0-litre CRDi diesel, and four wheel drive 2.7-litre V6 petrol variants.
New Kia Picanto
The revised Picanto range is available in Picanto, Picanto 2, Picanto Ice and Picanto 3 levels of specification and there are 1.0 and 1.1-litre petrol engine options. Automatic transmission is available for 1.1-litre Picanto 2 and Picanto Ice derivatives.
Prices start at £5,995 and rise to £7,996. Ice manual and automatic versions go on sale this week, 1 November, and the rest of the range will be available from Kia’s UK dealerships from 1 January 2008.
Quality volume manufacturer
Kia no longer wish to see the image of their brand being reflected in a policy of ‘stack them high and sell them cheap’ which boosted their UK registrations to an all time high of nearly 40,000 units in 2005 being driven by unprofitable daily-rental, fleet and low-cost £1 deposit finance deals.
Speaking this week at the media launch of the two revised ranges Stephen Kitson, Kia’s UK communications director said: “We have changed our sales and marketing emphasis for the brand in the UK promoting Kia to now be a design led and a ‘quality’ volume manufacturer. This has been brought about by moving design and production of some of our models to Europe.”
“We have to make people want to choose our cars because of their design and quality coupled with attractive pricing and the industry’s best warranty package.”
“Two years ago our UK sales were 65 per cent to fleets and 35 per cent to retail customers. Now that has completely turned around and today fleet and business customers only reflect 30 to 35 per cent of UK sales.” Kia has said they want to become a top ten manufacturer for retail sales in the UK by 2010 with a 3 per cent market share.
He added, “Sales of vehicles to fleet and business users is still vitality important to the brand but most of these sales are now mainly undertaken by our dealers, not so much by us directly. We currently have 140 UK dealers of which 45 are ‘fleet sales specialists’ and we are actively looking to add to the number of dealers we have - around 180 would be ideal.
"We are currently looking for the right people in the right locations. To grow our presence in the UK’s competitive market we have to push the quality of our products and size of our dealer network forward.”
“The changes in design with more European built models available to us, and the adjustment in specification for the Sportage and Picanto model line-ups, reflects our programme for change.
"These latest adjustments give the customers the specification they want at the price they want to pay. We aim to sell around 30,000 new cars in the UK this year.”
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