Kia’s sleek new car designs are a bid to be seen as a luxury brand

Kia has been speeding towards the creation of premium products, with sleek, stylish designs, electric vehicles and its latest car, the EV9.

The teaser of the exterior of the Kia EV9

I know what you’re thinking, and why your lip is curling ever so slightly. Kia? What is a Korean car doing splayed across a page of this beautiful magazine, more particularly the page that’s usually adorned with beautiful European machinery?

Well, one answer would be that Kia is now making cars like the Kia EV6 GT, which has more power than the sensational Ferrari 458, one of the great supercars of all time, which had 419kW compared to the Kia’s fast and furious 430kW. To drive that car is to realise, instantly, that things have changed.

While the EV6 GT can hit 100km/h in 3.5 seconds and has twin motors that spin to 21,000rpm – which all sounds properly super – it is not quite as visually splendid as a Ferrari 458. But fear not, because Kia is getting a whole lot better at that side of things too; indeed it’s been investing in what you might call the Beauty Department since 2006.

That’s when German (of course) automobile designer Peter Schreyer, the man responsible for shaping Audi into a sleek and stylish world-beater (most famously creating the bauhaus-inspired Audi TT), was hired as Kia’s chief design officer. The once daggy brand quickly began to transform its cars into something you might actually want to be seen in.

And how important is design? Well, the combination of premium-level sex-appeal and wallet-friendly price tags has seen Kia ascend to become Australia’s third highest-selling car brand in 2022, shifting more than 2.9 million units globally. And, perhaps most incredibly, outperforming its far more famous sister brand, Hyundai, in this country.

What’s even more impressive is what’s coming down the line: the undeniably eye-catching, slightly controversial shape of its next luxury-level electric vehicle, the EV9. It will be the most expensive Kia ever sold, with a price north of six figures yet to be finalised.

The frontseats of the Kia EV9

Artur Martins, global chief brand officer and chief experience officer at Kia, says the hiring of Schreyer was undeniably a gamble, but one that paid off handsomely.

“At the time, that was a gigantic bet by the head of Kia, hiring Peter and giving the lead of global design to a foreigner, a non-Korean,” he says. “But ever since then design has become a really important element of the DNA of the brand, and it will continue to be even more so in the future.

“Our designers are extremely good contributors to all discussions about brand, and how you create customer engagement and improve customer experience. Even though they are not business people, they look at design in a very customer-centric way, almost without thinking about it.”

Despite the “customer-centric” focus, Kia’s executive vice president and head of global design Karim Habib says the brand’s Opposites United design philosophy, which uses concepts of disruption, contradiction and contrast to create undeniably challenging looks, should ultimately leave people feeling slightly uneasy.

The back seats of the Kia EV6 GT

“We’re lucky to be part of a car company where, even though they’re investing billions to build a car, there’s still the thought that you’re going to provoke people a little bit and make them feel a bit uncomfortable,” he says. “That is a great enabler that we have, that our bosses basically understand that value and trust us to find that line.

“Still, it’s hard to say exactly what’s right, and there are certain moments where you think you’re going too far and you wonder if people are going to like it or not, so it’s a process.”

Habib uses the analogy of a song you hear on the radio that is instantly likeable but grows old quickly as an example of what Kia is trying to avoid with its designs. “I think the point when it’s a 3D object like a house or a car is that you discover things over time,” he says. “If it’s easily understandable from the first impression, maybe it lacks richness.”

That envelope-pushing ethos is on full display in the seven-seater EV9, Kia’s head-turning flagship large SUV, which is due to reach Australian roads by the end of the year. Where the EV6 is low and curvy, the EV9 is long, big and boxy – the kind of car that will almost certainly make you pause and ponder, and possibly curl your lip.

“For Kia, the important thing is that it looks not like it’s from the future but that it’s part of a movement towards something new, towards something better,” says Habib.

“We wanted the EV9 to feel natural as an SUV, but we also wanted it to feel like it had space. You can show space by making things bigger, but we also wanted to do it in a more human-oriented way by not having more metal, but more glass – that way it shows there’s more room in the cabin. The car’s centre of gravity is also quite low so as to not make it feel very high and threatening, but nonetheless pretty confident.”

Artur Martins says disrupting traditional car segments via design is very much the mantra at Kia. The move to EVs should offer a chance to effectively reinvent the wheeled machine. “There’s nothing that is restricting us to stick with very conventional body types. In fact that’s exactly what we will not be doing, and design will have a fundamental role in that,” Martin says. “Our designers at Kia are challenging our thinking in regard to segments – sometimes we go to design and we look and we say ‘What the hell is that? We’re supposed to have a sedan.’ And they say, ‘Well, why should we have a sedan? We can build something different.’

“I think segments will become increasingly hard to describe due to design choices. We’re going to very much be at the forefront of challenging that.

“The human brain very easily goes to the traditional, and what you’re used to seeing, so we are very resistant to change. But the reality is that after you get exposed to it, and it makes sense, it just becomes normal.”