By Brendan Moore
My goodness, the hits just keep coming from Kia. Here we have the exuberant and pretty 2012 Kia Optima SX, a car that is sure to give serious heartburn to its competitors like the Honda Accord and the Toyota Camry.
Why? Because it does things better than those cars, it’s less expensive and it’s much better-looking – in a nutshell. That’s why. No mystery here.
By Carl Malek
Kia has announced the final pricing of its 2012 Kia Rio and Rio5 models. Pricing for Kia’s smallest offering will begin at a wallet-friendly $13,600 for a base Rio LX 5 door equipped with the manual transmission. Customers who want an automatic transmission can expect to pay a slightly higher starting price of $14,700. At these price points, the 2012 model actually manages to achieve a much lower starting price than the former model that it replaces.
By Chris Haak
The midsize sedan segment is the true heart of the US market. Aside from full-size pickups, no segment in the US sells more vehicles than does the one that features such heavy hitters as the Toyota Camry, Honda Accord, Nissan Altima, Chevrolet Malibu, Ford Fusion, Hyundai Sonata, Mazda6, and…Kia Optima.
Wait. Kia Optima? You mean the one that looks like a 2001 Honda Accord?
By Chris Haak
About a year ago, Kia ventured into new territory with its first mainstream vehicle above the $30,000 line. The brand that was once proud to tout its Rio subcompact as the cheapest car sold in America was on its way upmarket, where the profit margins are fatter, where buyers don’t default to your vehicles
Fast forward a year later, and the 2011 Sorento has firmly established itself as Kia’s flagship vehicle in the US. Not only is it the most expensive Kia sold in the US, but it’s also the company’s best-selling vehicle, and the Korean automaker’s first US-built vehicle. From the 2011 Sorento’s launch in January 2010 through December 31, some 108,202 of the attractive crossovers found buyers. The next-best selling Kia was the Forte compact, which had 68,500 sales, or 37 percent fewer.
By Chris Haak
With the poaching of design head Peter Schreyer from Audi several years ago, Kia has turned itself from a brand that had no design identity to one that has a coherent language across its lineup, and that one drapes Kia vehicles in interesting and dynamic shapes. With the 2011 Optima and Sportage now on sale, Kia’s lineup has nearly been completely transformed from also-rans into competitively-styled vehicles.
While design is certainly a differentiator among new vehicles, and can catch the attention of buyers, it takes more than just good looks to establish and sustain success in a very competitive automotive landscape. Kia loaned me a 2011 Sportage for a week so I could find out if it also had beauty within, or if in fact its beauty was just skin deep.
By Charles Krome
I know it might seem a bit late to tackle the Super Bowl ads again, but there’s an interesting story about them in today’s Detroit Free Press that provides an inside look at the lengths to which some automakers go to get the most out of their efforts.
Here’s the deal according to journalist Chrissie Thompson: Almost as soon as the VW Passat/Star Wars ad hit the Internet (two days before the big game), it started to get people’s attention. And among those people were Joel Ewanick, GM’s global chief marketing officer, who has earned quite a reputation in the industry for his PR acumen. Ewanick apparently knew a good thing when he saw it, then showed exactly how he garnered that aforementioned rep. He had Chevy work a short-term deal with Google so that when folks searched certain intergalactically related terms—like “Darth Vader”—links to Chevrolet’s Super Bowl ads popped up at the top of the page. And then he did the same kind of thing with the phrase “Imported from Detroit” after the Chrysler 200/Eminem ad broke.
By Chris Haak
According to the annual customer retention study conducted by J.D. Power and Associates, the Ford and Honda brands each managed to retain 62 percent of their buyers during 2010, putting them in the top spots among brands sold in the US. The former top brand in customer retention, Mercedes-Benz, saw its loyalty rate slip from 66 percent in 2009 to 59 percent in 2010. Ford coincidentally showed an improvement similar to the size of Mercedes’ slippage.
On the bottom end of the scale, Saab showed a pathetic 4 percent retention rate, but for quite a while, there were nearly no new Saabs available to purchase while the small Swedish automaker actually began wind-down proceedings before Spyker swept in and rescued the company. Jaguar, however, has no such excuse for its 16 percent retention rate. Another interesting brand is Toyota, which – at 60 percent customer retention – is right on the heels of the leaders, despite what we might expect to see in the form of fallout from its recall crisis earlier this year. Hyundai and Lexus share the 60 percent mark with Toyota, and Kia made a dramatic 21-point leap, from 37 percent to 58 percent, in just a single year.
By Charles Krome
Well, in Europe anyway. That’s the lowdown from the European Automobile Manufacturer’s Association by way of Automotive News. According to those sources, Hyundai and Kia have combined to ring up 521,369 sales across the pond through October, up 4 percent compared to the same time last year, while Toyota (plus Lexus) saw sales slip 17 percent to finish at 511,754. Unsurprisingly, experts pinned the blame on fallout from the Toyota Recallathon as well as improving quality for the South Koreans.
And although things haven’t swung to the same extremes in the U.S., consider this: Toyota-Lexus had 1,448,589 U.S. sales at this point in 2009, with Hyundai-Kia tallying 634,282 customers, which meant that the South Koreans had sold 43.7 percent of Team Toyota’s total. In 2010, the numbers went 1,456,790 for the Japanese and 752,926 for Hyundai-Kia, with the latter now representing 51.6 percent of the former’s total. Hyundai and Kia obviously still have a ways to go before they catch Toyota and Lexus, but just as obviously, momentum is now on their side as the industry continues to recover. Plus, even assuming Toyota now has its quality issues under control, dealing with them has left the company well behind its Hyundai-Kia competition (among others) in a number of key areas.
By George Straton
Recently, I had the opportunity to spend a day at a media event outside Chicago where I was able to play the automotive version of musical chairs. Over six grueling hours, I and a few dozen other media members were able to get some seat time in 30 or so newer automotive models. The following is the result of the time spent with several new-for-model year 2011 offerings which we think will have some sort of impact in the marketplace.
By Charles Krome
At the beginning of summer, as I was chatting with my friend Rod about the curvaceous lines of my third-gen Ford Taurus, he asked me how many miles I had on the odometer. When I told him I was just about to hit six figures, he gave me a knowing look—Rod’s a Ford quality engineer—and mentioned I’d probably want to start searching for another ride in the not-too-distant future.
Sure enough, a few days ago, with about 103,000 miles on the clock, I heard the two words no one ever wants to hear from a mechanic: “head gasket.”
Now, the car itself was cosmetically very clean, with no rust issues, and I had long been telling everyone—with a certain amount of seriousness—that one day it would be a classic. This 1996-1999 generation was the fruit of the first comprehensive Taurus redesign, and, truth be told, the reception was positively Aztek-like. There was nary a straight line to be seen on the car’s exterior, which its designer supposedly likened to a pair of slippers, and that ovoid design theme carried through to the Taurus’ interior, with similar results.
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