Why KIA are the new Toyota.

Kia are about as exciting as washing the dishes.

The stinger is quite cool but...Toyota they ain't.

My father in law has an 08 Rio still running fine. Wife has a 2010 Ceed without issues and I have an Optima phev without issues.

They seem pretty reliable. An 89 Camry on a farm with a ridiculous amount of miles? Not sure yet but they aren't unreliable and are well put together.

Not really, i dont think they've made a good car in the last two decades.

The difference is when Toyota used to say they were the best built cars in the world, say late 80's to early 00's stuff, their product was very well built and very reliable notably moreso than a lot of other cars on the market.

Now, lots of manufacturers seem to make consistently reliable products, Kia I would say though is not one.

A simple story of "my daddy owns a Kia and it hasn't broken down" doesn't make them a good car.

My own opinion would be conparing the Kia of the today to the Toyota of 20 years ago in reliabililty/ build quality terms shows how little someonw actually knows about the two brands.

It's also a brand expectation/ ownership expectation type of opinion, as was pointed out before on here. A bit like how the Skoda Octavia would generally fare better than a VW Golf in ownership surveys, despite largely being the same car.

Kia are grand masters at making ugly cars, dear me some of the hideous lumps they have on the road at the moment... I'm sure I saw one of the electric ones they do they other day, I still have nightmares about it.

If you think back to 90's motoring, if you were even alive then, central locking (not remote central locking, just central locking) and electric front windows were exciting. It didn't take a lot.

The difference in 1993 was your Corolla would start first time on a cold morning while the fella next door was choking and cranking the life out of his Escort to try and get it started. That was what made them good, the enjoyment was the dependability.

People buy a Golf because they want one. That's the point, it's a mindset of expectation. Sure a Golf does some things better in reality but it does a lot of things better in the owners mindset and that's what's important and that's why you think Kia are so much better than they are - you've had one and it hasn't broken down, therefore, they all mustn't. Except that isn't reality.

So much waffle. Toyota, the company that gave us the Corolla, Celica, Supra, 86, Soarer, MR2 and countless JDM awesome awesome cars. I mean off the top of my head I can think of several legendary engines that Toyota produced and your comparing that to a Kia, which is almost indistinguishable from a Hyundai. If you prefer Kias to Toyotas you either hate cars or hate yourself.

Somebody please try convincing my father that Kia are the new Toyota because he ain't buying it.

He had a 2009 Auris for about 10 years that only had 1 issue in all that time, a leak in the boot from rain getting in via one of the rear lights. He replaced it with a 1 year old Kia Stonic which so far has been back to the Kia dealer 3 times because of an issue with an inaccurate reading fuel gauge. Now it has to go in again next week because the horn stopped working. Not major things but major enough to a man in his mid 70s who was used to driving a car hassle free that only saw a garage when it needed a service. The Stonic was bought to see his driving days out but I honestly don't see him keeping it that long.

I know that mechanics and end customers will have their preferences - but I work in automotive manufacturing, where Toyota's reputation precedes them still. They are seen as the benchmark for "quality".

"Quality" does not mean the most complex, the best driving, the cheapest, the strongest, or the best looking - but their engineering culture is that of simplifying and honing their design until it's as reliable as possible, while the Germans tend to engineering their way out of a problem instead.

While the Koreans under engineer which comes with it's own set of problems.

Hot dog?