Kia Cee'd (2007-) Review

Overview

• Next: Reliability and Quality

Korean cars have for a number of years been a watchword for cheaply built, unstylish jalopies that are about as much fun to drive as a Sinclair C5 in a typhoon.

But things are, slowly, changing - and the Cee'd is a serious step forward in improving the image of cars from the land of tae kwon do and student demonstrations.

Indeed, the Cee'd (sorry, but wordplay is inevitable when you give a car as bad a name as this), although not quite a paradigm shift in how Korean motors are perceived by Europeans, will probably be the car that we will in the future regard as the one that forced us to take Korea seriously as a carmaker. For while it still has some ground to make up on the Japanese, and will do well to meet China's challenge over the next decade, Korean carmakers seem to have sussed out how to be taken seriously by the rest of the world, if the Cee'd is any indication.

So how can they be taken seriously? Easy - design and build in Europe for the European market. The Cee'd has been designed at Kia's European Design Centre in Russelsheim, Germany - which will soon be replaced by an even newer studio in Frankfurt that will be independent of parent company Hyundai - and it will be built at the company's new production facility at Zilina in Slovakia.

The Cee'd is then, to all intents and purposes, a European car, with a European character, European looks and European performance - up to a point.

Kia is certainly showing some large cojones by aiming to take on the small family market segment, one of the industry's strongest, with 550,000 sales in the UK per year. And who's the opposition? Only old favourites the Ford Focus, Vauxhall Astra, VW Golf, Renault Megane and Peugeot 307, which between them have 75% of sales.

True, Kia UK only expects to sell 10,000 Cee'ds next year (giving it 2% of the market), but they could end up harvesting a tidy sum if British buyers take to the seven-year warranty on offer and like the amount of kit you get as standard for what could be as much as £2,000 less than the big five are asking for comparably specced cars.