There’s a new sheriff in town…

Look out Ford and Volkswagen: there’s a new sheriff in town. Kia is the number one best-selling car brand in the UK.

For now, it’s just for the first quarter of a chip-and-war-interrupted sales year, but I wouldn’t bet against this being the start of something, rather than a one-off.

This is a result that, if you’d suggested it 20 years ago, the SMMT would have had you sectioned. You’d be mocked and derided, as if offering a mid-corner sneeze as the explanation for crashing a new sportscar.

But the writing was on the wall as early as 2006, when the South Korean brand launched the (ridiculously punctuated) Cee’d. When the car was launched in Rome that year, company executives spoke about how they were now designing, engineering and building cars in Europe, to meet the expectations of European customers. They also talked about benchmarking the Cee’d against the Ford Focus and Volkswagen Golf, which raised a few eyebrows among the assembled journalists. Scepticism was a justified response: the automotive industry has a long history of overhyped claims.

The proof was that the Cee’d (despite the stupid spelling) was no pudding. It was a very decent car - not quite a Focus or Golf, but a real stride forward in quality, in all departments. Kia also stuck a load of equipment in the Cee’d as standard that European rivals only included as optional extras (for more money, natch). It’s a clever, customer-friendly policy that has probably helped turn a lead or two (hundred thousand) into a sale.

The other customer-friendly stroke of genius was to peruade Peter Schreyer to join as chief design officer. A designer steeped in the ways of the VW Group and, most notably, Audi (he was responsible for the Audi TT, which qualifies as a modern design classic, in my book), he had a thorough grounding European (and US) design aesthetics. Throw into the mix real flair as a designer and a vision for the look of Kia models, and you have the perfect appointment at the perfect time.

The cars that Kia launched over the next few years - and they launched a lot, shortening the usual on-sale lifetime of a model from seven years to five - certainly caught the eyes of prospective buyers, as did sticker prices that undercut the established mainstream manufacturers. The ‘budget brand’ tag that had followed it from the days of the Pride and Magentis was still there, thanks to the pricing policy: but it started to fade, as the likes of the Cee’d and third-generation Sportage (launched in 2010) showed that Kias were different now. (I always maintained that the Sportage was the best-looking mainstream car on sale at that time.)

Kia has given car buyers what they want. Its cars are well-built, reliable (backed up by a seven-year warranty that no other mainstream carmaker offers), look cool, have lots of useful gadgets included in the price and cost less than many rivals - although Kia is no budget brand now, thanks to prices creeping up steadily over the last few years.

Kia - along with sibling brand Hyundai, which has taken the same road to success in the last 20 years and could just as easily now be the top brand - is also not hanging about in switching to EVs, either. Figures for the first quarter of 2022 show that 18% of the brand’s sales are EVs, with another 12% having some sort of hybrid system. The e-Niro and EV6 are leading the charge, but expect rapid rollouts of new models over the next few years (chips allowing).

Kia’s success is not a flash in the pan. It’s the result of a well-planned, well-executed strategy to make Kia a popular mainstream brand, building cars that buyers want to own. The fact that it’s currently the best-selling brand in the UK suggests that it’s job done.

Oh, and Kia dropped the logica interruptus apostrophe from the Ceed name in 2018, so they learn from their mistakes, too. Which is nice.