Kia’s Sportspace wagon concept is so damn gorgeous and near perfect that we count just three things we don’t like about it. First, the large ventlike things in the rear fascia seem out of place; second, the rear license-plate mount needs to be relocated from the otherwise gloriously spare tailgate; and third, the front running-lamp/vent pieces seem to riff a bit too hard from Volvo’s playbook. Seriously, that’s it—we’d eat up the rest of the Sportspace in one bite, chewing optional.

Now this is the part where we tell you that the Sportspace is just another piece of vaporware, another heart-tugging preview of a Europe-market-only station wagon that we’ll never be able to buy. Well, that’s only partially true, as far as we know. What we’re looking at here, folks, is very likely the next-generation Kia Optima mid-size sedan, gussied up in station-wagon clothes in a bid to capture the interest of European types at the 2015 Geneva auto show.

MARC URBANO

Follow along with us here: The Optima sedan is currently sold in Europe in basically the same form it is sold in here, and a redesigned version of the car is due this year. It’s pretty easy to connect the two dots with a very straight line and assume that this is the new Optima, as we did when Kia teased the Sportspace last week.

Having shown the car in this form, however, it would appear as though Kia is at least considering adding a liftback model to its European Optima lineup. We’re also glad it doesn’t appear to be following the lead of corporate sibling Hyundai in dialing back the hotness of its mid-size offering. The current Optima wowed the automotive world with its daring and remarkably upscale design in 2010, and the Sportspace is even more impressive.

View Photos MARC URBANO

Details surrounding the car’s powertrain and interior are forthcoming—we’ll know more when we see it in person next month in Geneva. Our inner nerds have our fingers crossed for some sort of diesel-electric hybrid setup like that in the Optima T-Hybrid concept from the 2014 Paris auto show, but a turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder would better fit the sporty vibe. It is almost certainly front-drive, but all-wheel drive would come in handy when traversing the snowy backdrop in the press photos.

Should the next Optima spring forth from the scorching Sportspace relatively intact, it would immediately render Toyota’s newly stylized Camry boring, let alone the conservative four-doors from Honda, Hyundai, and Chevrolet. The Kia would give even Mazda’s drop-dead-gorgeous 6 a run for its money. We have our fingers crossed that we can get in on the wagon action—after all, the last Kia-badged station wagon sold in the U.S. was the somewhat dumpy Rio Cinco from the early 2000s, and that’s a terrible way to close the book on the body style.

MARC URBANO

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