KIA
ON POINT
While the car industr y loses its head, Kia’s been quietly reinventing itself
WORDS OLLIE KEW
MANUFACTURER OF THE YEAR
ILLUSTRATION OLGUN KORDAL
Who would be a carmaker in 2022 and beyond? You can’t get the parts, you probably can’t get the staff, your costs are on the up and up, and customers are grouchy about their waiting times. Sceptics are insisting you’ve gone too soon on EVs, purists wonder loudly why you’re not exclusively building lightweight rear-wheeldrive hoonmobiles with open-gated manual gearboxes that are impervious to depreciation, and environmentalists would rather you didn’t build anything at all. OK, it’s hard to actually feel sorry for a faceless global multi-billion dollar corporation, but would you want to be in charge of a mainstream maker right now?