They say everybody remembers their first, right? Well Kia made many firsts with the Stinger GT. It’s the company’s first rear-wheel-drive sports sedan, first car that can hit 0-60 in under five seconds, and first-ever car they make that I want to buy.
Let’s speak frankly—the Stinger GT makes some power. Under the hood is a 3.3-liter V6 which tightly packs two turbochargers into the mix. When flat-footing the gas, you’re looking at 365 horsepower and 376 lb-ft of torque from 1,300 rpm until 4,500 rpm. The good news that Kia debuted at the Seoul Motor Show is that the car has a 0.2 second-faster 0-60 mile-per-hour time than expected, falling to 4.9 seconds overall. That’s properly quick for a family sedan, let alone a Kia, given that this is its fastest car yet. The car will accelerate to 167 mph before it has reached its limit.
The only caveat is that Kia does not plan to offer a manual transmission, at least not in the 2018 model year. Only an eight-speed automatic will be available, but the power will be reaching the rear wheels—something else Kia has not done before in this type of market. Then again, most of the other cars in the same premium-feel range are offering predominantly automatic gearboxes, so is this much of a surprise? Either way, we can cross our fingers that this changes in future iterations of the Stinger.
Kia has come a long way from their economy class cars you would shun off due to looking bland. The Stinger GT’s body lines remind me of BMW’s newer F30 3-series, with the interior of a Mercedes SLS AMG (it’s probably the round crosshair vents) if you ignore the half-an-iPad protruding from the dashboard. The Stinger GT also is expected to come in at a fraction of that cost, netting street value right around $50,000 (though no official number has showed up from the manufacturer yet. Kia will also offer two less attractive configurations with a single-turbo 2.0-liter motor (255 horsepower and 260 lb-ft of torque) and a 2.2-liter diesel expected to start under $30,000.
I will confess that I like this car in the same way that I like the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio. I haven’t driven either (yet), but you better believe I want to put both the Shamrock-touting Giulia and the South-Korean flagship car through the wringer.