Sizzling Stinger

This award-winning Korean fastback has defied odds and expectations with its ability to deliver practicality, performance and panache.

- Dr Kong Yongyao 

PERCEPTION is a funny, sticky thing.

Nobody will argue with you when you say that the Kia Optima is one heck of a taxi, or that the Rio is a quality little runabout for remarkable little money.

But a sporty rear-wheeldrive fastback from the same Korean carmaker to be spoken about in the same breath as a BMW? No way.

Well, what better way to entrench your brand’s credibility as an engineering force in the luxury arena than by picking a fight with the BMW 3 Series?

After all, the junior executive model is notoriously difficult to get right. Fail, and the view that Korean automakers can do value but not luxury will harden and persist.

But if you succeed at muscling your way into that exclusive little clique, in which the 3 Series, Mercedes C-Class and Audi A4 have been chattering merrily amongst themselves while casting snooty looks at outsiders, and your brand will be elevated to a whole new plane.

One feels, therefore, that the Kia Stinger is actually a brand-defining exercise rather than a revenue-generating one.

Kia went out and poached a head designer from Audi and a head engineer from one of the most pedigreed divisions in all of autodom: BMW M.

So, you’d better believe the carmaker when it says that it is out to build the very best car it could.

Most importantly, above and beyond mere sales, to prove it can build a car for critical acclaim.

So, here we are. Let’s put all that philosophising aside and evaluate the car as it is. Luxuriate in it and drink in its exquisite driving manner.

I’ll cut to the chase: Kia has done it. The Stinger is a brilliant car. Not brilliant “for a Kia”, not brilliant “for a first try”.

The Stinger is simply, without qualification, excellent. Let there be no doubt, this car is as good as the ones it is aimed squarely at.