“Sports saloon for the gamer generation” is planned for production, and it could spawn an estate
Kia will put the Vision Meta Turismo concept into production as a new flagship model in the vein of the V6-powered Stinger GT S – but only once the price is viable, the brand’s design chief has told Autocar.
The striking GT concept was revealed in Korea last year to mark Kia’s 80th birthday. It sits on a new platform and showcases a bold new era of design for Kia called Opposites United: Evolution.
The current design language, Opposites United, started with the EV6 in 2021 and defined every model up until the EV2, unveiled last month.
Asked what was stopping Kia from putting the electric four-door super-GT into production today, design chief Karim Habib told Autocar: “At this point, it is more strategic. It’s a pure EV and the price of doing a high-performance EV is what is slowing us down. Hopefully, the upward movement of EVs keeps going. I think there will be more openness to this [type of] car. At least that’s what we’re betting on.”
He added: “We have a small history of doing cars like the Stinger and that’s something we don’t want to give up on. The Meta Turismo is our idea of a sports sedan for the gamer generation. A few years ago, we started thinking about what could we do beyond SUVs? We do produce and sell a lot of SUVs, which is good, but we also believe that there’s more than that.”
Autocar was recently invited to see the concept, alongside a proposed fastback variant that is a close match in profile to the Hyundai Ioniq 9 and has yet to be shown publicly. Habib said the team had already created a “90% production-ready” model, suggesting it could also be in Kia’s plans.
Europe design boss Oliver Samson said: “We wanted to answer that question to ourselves: is that something we could do or how would that look like? In order for us to answer the question, we needed to prove that it would work. And, yeah, [we found that] it would be physically possible.”
Evolution, not revolution, key
Compared with today’s cars, the next generation of Kias won’t look drastically different, which is why the new Opposites United: Evolution design language has been named to sound like a sequel.
Instead, the key changes will be in how the new cars feel to use.
Habib explained: “We design purposely futuristic looking cars because we want them again to promise a better future and we want people to follow us on that. The idea of finding new ways is not just to find new ways, because something new for the sake of new really doesn’t bring anything. The point is that it needs to bring progress. It needs to bring something positive to the experience.
“And obviously with EVs and all the technology that has come with it – the difference in the architecture, the difference in the usability, the user experience – we believe it is progress for the automotive world. That is what we would like people to feel when they step into our cars.”
The first model expected to be influenced by the new design language is a recently confirmed electric city car. Potentially positioned as an EV alternative to the Picanto, it could take the EV1 badge when it is unveiled later this year. It is expected to go on sale by the end of 2027.
New design language to foster emotional connection
The Opposites United: Evolution design language is intended to make electric cars more emotionally engaging, head of interior design Jochen Paesen told Autocar.
The Vision Meta Turismo is key to this, he said, and a vital requirement for meeting the brief is to ensure that when people “see the car, they think: ‘Cool, I want to give that a go.'”
However, it isn’t as easy as just making it sporty, giving it a virtual gearbox and pumping out fake engine noise because new-generation buyers aren’t engaged by that, according to Paesen.
He said: “We’re car people. We grew up on the side of a race track hearing V8s, but those are not the things that the younger generation care as much about. It actually doesn’t trigger them. It triggered us, but we’re living in a different age, so understanding what triggers the younger generation and gets them emotionally tied in and emotionally interested, that’s important.”
The emotional connection to electric cars will be crucial going forward, said Paesen, as “that’s where, ultimately, differentiation will come in. That’s where brands can stand out from each other, and that’s where you can make a difference.”
The interior will be a pivotal factor in this. While the Vision Meta Turismo’s cabin features nothing that is immediately bound for production, its radically minimalist, functional and tech-led approach is being considered for the next-generation cars.
Modern Kias have always placed an importance on being functional. They have featured numerous physical buttons to control essential functions rather than putting everything behind a screen – and Paesen said the next stage is to make functionality its own aesthetic.
He explained: “We are not a premium brand. We design with our cost targets and we have to be very smart in how we do that. So we always try to look at how we can make the experience, how we make the usability, how we make the emotion, the smiles, come out in everything we do.”
“We just want to be authentic”
Kia won’t look to differentiate its models based on their powertrain, but neither will it make all of its cars look the same, said Habib.
“We just want to be authentic,” he explained. “So if there’s a [need for a] grille, we’re gonna have a grille… but it is not fixed in stone. You can speak [on this point] about exterior as well as interior. If you take a Seltos interior and an EV3 interior, there’s a lot of things that overlap.”
This approach has already started, according to Habib. He said: “One example: the Stonic facelift we just did actually looks more like an EV, because it had a fake grille before. [The air intakes are at the bottom.] So we found out that we can do something that looks like [electric] Kias but just looks the way it does, not because we want it to look EV.”
This was a point also made by Pasen. He said: “EVs have given us the opportunity to do things in a new way. They have influenced the ICE cars and they’ve sort of driven ideas and thinking forward in the ICE world. But we’re not trying to make an ICE [car] look like something else: it is still authentically an ICE [car], but they [ICE cars and EVs] influence each other.”
The next challenge is taking that forward to the generation beyond the next, said Pasen: “From an interior perspective, our interiors are quite minimal, quite simple, quite reduced. There is a trend towards reduction, simplification. What’s interesting is: where does that go next? How do you keep that fresh? How do you keep that going? And how do you make sure that you’re relevant?
“I think that’s the key in making sure that people actually value what you do and how you’ve designed it. And it feels very personal. That’s the key.”
