How’s this for a summary of the old-shape Optima: “the last time Kia had a vehicle in the D segment it was one that, pragmatically, had no credibility whatsoever”. So says the company’s head of UK media relations.
I can’t really call the car he’s refering to the old model, as Kia didn’t even have a Magentis, as it was badged here, on its press-test fleet. I know this as I asked to try one a while back.
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Meanwhile, over in Brazil, of all places, one of my closest friends owns the old-shape Magentis. He loves his car, which he bought new and paid a lot of money for. His priorities were headroom and a big boot and some luxury features plus one other all-important consideration. He lives in what an estate agent might term an edgy part of inner city Sao Paulo and has no garage. So while his neighbours’ Gols and Sienas and Palios and Unos get molested, his big Kia has not been troubled for its alloys or its badges or its grille or anything else. The very essence, if you’ll pardon the pun, of vanilla.
Here in Britain, the largest market for Kia Motors Europe (53,600 sales last year after more than 50,000 in 2010, placing it ahead of Germany where only 40,000 Kias were sold in 2011), the Optima has about the same amount of street-cred as James’ car. Less than zero. You’ve also got to respect Kia Motors UK for being so honest about its chances of success for this new sedan. A modest 1,600 cars are forecast and the importer is also only bringing in the 1.7-litre four-cylinder diesel. Elsewhere in Europe, Hyundai-Kia’s 2.0-litre petrol motor is also available.
The Optima, launched with that name at the New York motor show in April not quite two years ago, is therefore very late to the party here in Britain. So part two of the history lesson must therefore be brief – it replaced a car of the same name but in certain other markets where it wasn’t the Magentis, it was the Lotze. In Korea, the new car is the K5 and in May of 2010, its first month of sale, it went straight to the top of the charts there, stunning Kia and no doubt greatly ruffling the feathers of Hyundai. The supposed number two brand had humbled the then still-new Sonata.
The K5 is also now made in China, and in the US, as the Optima. I mention all of this as a way of underlining just how plucky Kia UK is being by even selling the car here – the Georgia plant alone will churn out an estimated 150,000 units of the thing this year to keep up with soaring demand. The Americans and Canadians get petrol engines of course, plus a turbo and a hybrid. No diesel, at least not yet. And a 1.7-litre engine in a car as large as this, and it IS big, mind, would be a major marketing challenge even for the geniuses behind Kia Motors America’s legendary Hamster campaign from a couple of years back. Do da dippity indeed.
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By GlobalDataSo… what’s the new Optima like to drive on UK roads? Dave Leggett and I took one out late last week and found it at first to be a bit too firmly sprung. I asked the PR people had KME tightened up the ride so as to give the thing a sense of sportiness to pre-empt luxo-barge criticism from the enthusiast mags. Yes, it seemed. “Try the one with 17-inch wheels”, I was told. So I did. I love the 18-inchers that you see on the pic that accompanies these words, well I love them to look at, but they made for a choppy ride on admitedly bumpy and poorly maintained Hampshire B-roads. And you can also tell that manual transmission cars were not a priority for the interior designers – the shift lever was awkwardly placed for five foot ten and longish-armed me.
Forget the diesel engine for a moment: this is really an American car, if you think about it. So it proved, in automatic form, and on the 17-inch alloys. The six-speed self-shifter was a joy. Smooth changes, soft-plastic paddles that are intelligently placed behind the boss of the steering wheel and the ride, well it was transformed. I had been lucky enough to try a US-spec Optima Hybrid back in September and can report that while I would never pretend to have even 25% of the road test skills of someone like Autocar magazine’s Steve Sutcliffe, I could tell this car had been set up for freeways, not the slithery tram tracked-roads of downtown Frankfurt where I punted it about for 30 minutes or so.
Will anyone in Britain see this car as an object of desire? I reckon they just might. The Vauxhall Insignia has reignited this segment (the country’s number six best seller in 2011, with more than 46,000 registrations) and Kia wants just a little bit of the action. Private customers should be the main buyers though some smaller fleets might also be tempted. People like taxi operators. There are dinosaurs walking amongst us who think that such cars are undesirable, using that long-outdated term, ‘minicab’. Put me in the back of a properly sized car brimming with the latest safety features and possessed of a separate boot to take a rear-end shunt any day.
Back to the Optima as a taxi driver’s choice. Why not? I would be thrilled to emerge from the shaky and overheated delights of any of Britain’s latest, state of the art 20th century trains and sink into the rear pew of something roomy awaiting in the cab rank. This I occasionally do and it’s how I fell in love with the Škoda Superb. The big Kia reminds me of it: loads of legroom, terrifically efficient A/C, not much roly-poly action going on round the bends, and a sensibly-shaped boot that is claimed will swallow 505 litres’ worth of luggage. And another oft-overlooked benefit of a lot of cars sold in Europe – stop-start, for peaceful jams.
There isn’t any audible diesel rattle, plus it’s 2012, so let’s move the argument on as the latest compression-ignition engines are not noisy. Here’s one thing I would insist upon having: the automatic gearbox. To me it should be standard but we have the oddities of the UK’s tax system for it being an option. The 134bhp unit delivers a C02 average of 128g/km in six-speed manual form (and an official average of 57.6mpg) but this deteriorates greatly to 158g/km and 47.1mpg for the auto. Thus are the peculiarities of official test cycles. Exhibit B: I often drive a Prius and in the real world, this heavy car that needs a firm press on the throttle to enliven progress quickly becomes almost a gas guzzler, yet officially it’s a fuel sipper.
And so, finally, to the question: would I buy an Optima? No. It’s the equal of its rivals but it’s not cheap (even the admittedly very well equipped base version is a steepish £19,995) And let’s face it, not even Kia will try to tell you that this car is going to hold a large proportion of its value.
But hold on a second. Would I buy one that’s a year old? No hesitation, provided it had that superb automatic gearbox. Why? Because of Kia Motors Europe’s trump card, one of the main reasons why this brand continues to push its way up the sales charts in so many countries in this part of the world. The seven year warranty (or 100,000 miles) does, unlike some brands’ rival guarantees, give you blanket coverage, and it is transferable to subsequent owners. This is what I call super-intelligent brand building. It is also no doubt building Kia’s resales.
Forget the UK and Italy and France and Spain, for now at least. These markets will come back strongly from their presently sleepy or comatose selves. In Germany, things are different – the economy continues to expand but Germans simply do not buy big Korean sedans. Or big Japanese ones, as Lexus Europe will tell you, with a sigh.
The rising markets of tomorrow in the other countries of central Europe, the countries below and to the east of Germany – the likes of Poland and Slovakia and the Czech Republic and the soon-to-have-created the new-EU28 – Croatia, these are the places where Kia is growing strongest. There’s a new generation of self-made people in these countries who won’t sniff at a Korean brand in the way that so many older souls in Blighty do. You can add Ukraine and Russia to that list too: not for nothing has Honda just said that it plans to launch Acura division in both countries within the next two years (but has ruled out ‘old’ Europe).
When the Optima comes up for replacement around 2015 (OK, maybe 2016 in Europe) I would hazard a guess that it might well be seen as a serious and entirely natural rival for the Opel Insignia successor. Especially if the astonishing omission of the wagon bodystyle that KME must be nagging Kia HQ in Seoul for, appears. If the Americans and Canadians can have an Optima Coupe – that one’s on its way, I hear – why can’t we in Europe have an estate, when it’s what nearly everyone in this region’s D/E segment(s) buys?
In summary then, it’s a big leap for Kia, this new Optima, and it deserves to do the same sorts of volumes as the likes of the Superb. I personally hope it exceeds its targets so that the next one can have even more input from Kia Motors Europe.
See also: INTERVIEW: Simon Hetherington, Kia Motors (UK) Dealer Development Director
Author: Glenn Brooks
