Whoops.
While most of us here are busy fawning over Kia’s new performance saloon, the stylish Stinger, the Korean firm are now trying to direct attention to its more luxurious offerings. Australia hasn’t been exposed much to Kia’s proper luxury cars, but that hasn’t stopped the company’s local office pushing teasers of its new saloon flagship the K900.
The K900 that Kia’s been teasing with sketches will be the second iteration of the badge, with an alternative ‘K9’ nomenclature used in its native South Korea. It may be alien to us, but the K900 has been competing in the full-size luxury saloon class for almost two decades now, sitting alongside (in category, but below in price) cars like the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, Lexus LS, and Audi A8 in the North American market, particularly.
Kia may have waxed lyrical in their press releases about the ‘Gravity of Prestige’ design language and the ‘Duplex Comet’ daytime running light signatures, but they have just been sketches up to this point. However, a member of the forum ‘Bobaedream’ (whatever the hell that is) has spotted a K900, totally undisguised, on the back of a flatbed in the pouring rain, somewhere in South Korea (which was then reposted by Ferd on Facebook).
What’s clear is that the elegant, grown-up design language seen in the sketches has been replicated faithfully onto the production car. There’s plenty of chrome all over the place, including around the taillights, and big chrome wheels too.
Considering how faithful the sketches have been to the exterior, we can only imagine that the cabin of the K900 won’t stray far from the artistic impressions shown to us last week. The wraparound woodwork is particularly interesting, as is the ‘curved’ wood inlay in the steering wheel.
Notably, there’s also something that appears to be a rotary-knob infotainment control interface, connected to a widescreen display which, in the artistic impressions, looks like it’s displaying an interface system broadly similar to BMW’s very latest iDrive units. Hmm.
The K900 is expected to debut very, very soon, as Kia says it’s expected to go on sale in select markets within “the second-quarter of 2018,” which as far as we can tell, is about now…? What we’d like to know is why Kia Australia is pushing these releases in our direction: Could it be a hint that the K900 might find its way to us in time?
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