Saturday 20 October 2007

What's outside today 27 - Kia Kee show car

Frankfurt am Main, 18.10.07. Outside Kia's impressive new European headquarters - in fact on a quiet piece of road at the exhibition complex that hosts the Frankfurt motor show.


A bit of a lull in the Verdict testing programme this week, but I was kept busy carwise on Thursday with the opportunity to nip over to Germany to drive Kia's Kee design study. The chance to get behind the wheel of manufacturers' show cars, prototypes or design studies is a rare privilege. Normally, car-makers are extremely nervous about letting journalists anywhere near a car that isn't the finished product, so it was interesting not only to be able to sample the Kee but also get a long chat with its designer Peter Schreyer, formerly of Audi.

The picture shows the car being loaded onto its transporter after a few days of being sampled by UK motoring journalists, a process which it survived in one piece - presumably much to the relief the people at Kia, who were about to ship it straight out to the LA motor show, where I'm sure it will appeal to the Americans.

Herr Schreyer was very generous with his time when explaining his work to us - I hope my forthcoming piece for the Indy will do this interesting story justice.

1 comment:

Fourwheelsteer said...

Sounds interesting, can't wait to see it in the paper.