Concept cars are peculiar beasts. Far too often, they parade pie-in-the-sky ideas wrapped up in extreme exterior designs with angles and curves that will never see the inside of a mainstream car manufacturer’s showroom.
Kia have been guilty of this in the past and for the last five years, they’ve been showing off drafts for a rear-wheel-drive performance saloon that was just little more than teasing.
Or so we thought, because now the South Korean carmaker has surprised us all by confirming their rear-driven five-seat four-door fastback saloon will finally hit UK (and US) roads in 2017.
Sting in the tail
It will go by the name of Stinger, which sounds about as fierce as you’d want, with a more potent GT variant sitting above it. The car was originally shown at the Frankfurt Motor Show back in 2011!
Rivalling the Audi A4 and BMW 4 Gran Coupe, the Stinger GT will be the “highest-performance production vehicle in the company’s history”, powered by a 3.3-litre twin-turbo V6 with 360bhp and 376lb ft of torque, linked to a second generation eight-speed automatic transmission and riding on 19-inch alloys as standard.
This adds up to a nought to 62mph sprint of 5.1 seconds and a top speed of 167mph.
Kia has never really focused on performance and previously, had only dipped its toe into warm-hatch waters with the 201bhp Pro Cee’d GT in 2013, so this is brave new territory for the brand.
Different animal
Albert Biermann, Kia’s head of vehicle test and high performance development, said the car feels like “a special event” for Kia.
“Because nobody expects such a car, not just the way it looks but also the way it drives, it’s a wholly different animal,” he added.
The more sensible standard Stinger sits on 18-inch wheels and uses a two-litre turbocharged petrol engine with 251bhp and 260lb ft of torque.
The Stinger will be offered with rear or all-wheel-drive in the States but it’s unclear right now whether that will be the case on this side of the pond.
We’ll find out when it launches here before the end of the year.
For more articles like this, receive our weekly e-newsletter, including partner deals and all things motoring, register your email below.
Please note: You cannot subscribe to Smart-Motoring unless you put a tick in the checkbox below to indicate have read and agreed to our privacy policy.
[…] isn’t a term we hear much these days, although there are plenty of them about – the Kia Stinger, Ford Mustang and the new Honda Civic – and as the side profile shot would attest, think of […]