By Steven Symes 
With the close of April, Kia has posted a familiar story, saying it was yet another record breaking month of car sales. The automaker issues press releases like this all the time, and I’m not exaggerating. Other record breaking months this year were March, February, and January. Plus, 2024 was the best sales year in the brand’s history, following 2023 being the best sales year ever.
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Obviously, a lot of people are choosing Kias over competing brands. For all of 2024, Kia sold just shy of 800,000 vehicles – not too shabby. Its three juggernaut models which constituted over half of those sales last year were the Sportage, K4/Forte, and Telluride.
I see those and other newer Kias all the time and you probably do as well. They’re everywhere. And it’s accelerating as Kia is on pace to break its record-breaking 2024 sales year by a fair margin.
What is it that attracts so many people to Kias? Most gearheads I know absolutely loathe Kia and sister brand Hyundai. After all, they don’t make many performance models, and ones they do aren’t all that impressive.
Plus, it’s roundly agreed upon in many circles that both brands have a lot of quality control and reliability problems. Yet people keep snatching them up like hotcakes.
I think it comes down to two factors: price and the “cool factor.”
Everyone knows Kias are cheap, in both senses of the word. With car prices soaring past ridiculous these days, I really can’t blame anyone for wanting to spend as little as possible. It used to be Mitsubishi and Suzuki scratched that itch, but one is out of the US and the other should be.
Kias are in general even cheaper than Hyundais and it’s not a coincidence they attract a younger consumer base. Kids and their parents are getting squeezed financially, so a car that’s relatively cheap and good enough for a bit is music to their ears.
But those kids also care about the “cool factor.” After all, they could drive grandma’s old Honda CR-V or Toyota RAV4, but let’s face it, they don’t have headlights that look like Ginsu knives or swoopy body lines. Kias do.
Sure, the current Kia designs are going to age like milk left in the sun, but with reliability and durability questionable, one could argue it and Hyundai are the fast fashion brands of the auto industry.
Obviously, that appeals to a growing number of people, many of them younger. So Kia keeps setting sales records, something we hope other automakers are not only noticing, but trying to understand and address in meaningful ways.
Image via Kia