I wasn’t sure Kia would go for it. I was going to visit the factory in West Point, Georgia, an hour southwest of Atlanta, and drive 400-something miles home to North Carolina in a Sorento SX Limited plucked straight off the assembly line. Handing a freshly built car over to a magazine writer requires confidence in your product—no break-in mileage, and no making sure that I get a perfect car. But Kia agreed. It’s a bold play, one that demonstrates that it has a point to prove.



I wondered if there was a turning point, where an executive in Korea pounded a fist on a table

Kia spent the early 2000s, its formative years, as the butt of jokes. Its cars were a reliable fixture at the bottom of the J.D. Power Initial Quality Study (IQS), which tallies owners’ complaints after three months of driving. As recently as 2005, Kia ranked 30th. A few years before that, it anchored the bottom, 37th place. Like fellow Koreans Hyundai and Daewoo, its cars were known for cheap MSRPs and not much else. In the early 2000s, the mechanic who worked on my ’91 Saab—no paragon of reliability itself—had a lucrative side job keeping Kias on the road. “I’ve got a pile of Sportage engines out behind the building,” he told me. “They’re always blowing up.”

But for the past two years, Kia has ranked number one on the IQS survey, with corporate siblings Hyundai and Genesis near the top, too. But reputations have inertia. I recently heard a comedian named Paul Varghese do a whole slew of Kia jokes. Setup: “The guy at the rental counter said, ‘Sir, we upgraded you . . . to a Kia.’ ” (Audience laughs.) Punch line: “You upgraded me from what, shoes?”

A welder makes final repairs to a completed body before it goes to paint. KIA

Scott Upham, CEO of Valient Market Research, has followed the Korean auto companies for decades and written studies to help their managers understand how to establish manufacturing in the U.S. “After Hyundai’s initial failures with its first wave of cars, they spent over a billion dollars researching how to improve quality,” he says. “This was new, for a Korean brand to make this high-level investment into quality. But it takes time to build up goodwill. They’ve had a tough row to hoe.”

Everyone at Kia, both at the Georgia factory and in Seoul, is aware of this, working hard to reverse those perceptions.

I remember driving the cars that informed that era of Kia. The mid-2000s Amanti felt like a goggle-eyed Mercedes E-Class rip-off. The Sedona was built with so much cast iron it weighed as much as a Tahoe. But change started in 2006. Kia hired designer Peter Schreyer away from Audi. It was a big poach —his résumé included the iconic Audi TT—and after he arrived, the cars started looking better. In 2009, the Soul became a surprise hit, and, across the whole company, IQS numbers and sales tracked up. In 2005, Kia’s market share was 1.62 percent, rising to 3.53 percent today. That growth is unprecedented in this industry, and partly the result of Schreyer’s mission to make Kias better looking. More specifically, to make them look different from Hyundais.

After panels have been stamped and hand-inspected for defects, robots handle the welding. This Kia plant in Georgia operates 24 hours a day, five days a week. KIA

Ah yes, Hyundai. Back in 1998, Hyundai bought a bankrupt Kia, and now owns about a third of the company. For the cars bearing either name, think of them as siblings, but not twins. Within the parameters of shared engineering, Hyundai and Kia have fairly wide leeway to design and market their cars in different ways. Not every Kia has a Hyundai equivalent, and vice versa. There is no Kia version of the Hyundai Veloster, no Hyundai version of the Soul. I’d say Kia’s designs skew younger and sportier, in general, but maybe I’m just buying into that hip-hamster-based marketing. Besides introducing anthropomorphic hamsters, Kia has also gradually moved upmarket. Charging more for its cars, says Kia spokesman Neil Dunlop, reflects a deliberate distinction between cost and value—“It’s not about being at the bargain end of the pricing spectrum,” he says. That means modern Kias still tend to be somewhat less expensive than their competitors, but not always. The Cadenza Limited is about $45,000. A totally loaded Lexus ES 350 is only about $3,000 more, while a lesser ES might cost the same. Charging similar prices is part of Kia’s way of saying, We’re not so different from Lexus, you know.

This pricing tactic reflects a transformation beyond quality. On the factory floor, I wondered if there was a particular moment, a turning point when an executive in Korea pounded a fist on a conference table and issued a decree to beat Lexus in the IQS. It took a few weeks for Kia, writing from Korea, to issue a response stating that there had been such a decision: “Yes, over a decade ago, Hyundai Motor Group, which includes Kia, made a conscious and deliberate decision to concentrate on quality rather than volume.” It seems nobody there wants to take credit. But back in Georgia, Kia was totally willing to show me how it translated that unlikely goal—worst to first—into a reality.

Using a computerized wrench, a worker calculates and records the number of revolutions and torque applied to bolts for the rear seat. KIA

West Point, like any car factory, is where theories and goals meet the harsh reality of large-scale manufacturing. This is where a thousand things can go wrong. Kia’s strategy is to catch them early. This plant has 39 codes just to flag paint defects (No. 14: “thin coat”; No. 39: “mottle”). And a panel only gets paint if it makes it past an earlier barrage of quality tests. “If even a single hair gets into a die,” says Ted Arnold, senior manager of quality assurance, “that can come out in the metal.” Thousands of tons of stamping force, and a hair can ruin everything.

“For a Korean company to spend $1 billion to research quality, this was new.”



Arnold is an industry veteran, having come from a Mercedes plant in Alabama. And even though there are 3,000 workers employed at West Point, he seems to know everyone—at least, everyone on this day shift. The line runs 24 hours a day, Monday to Friday. When a shift changes, the incoming workers stand behind the ones who are about to punch out and seamlessly continue building cars. “A lot of people around here used to work in the textile industry,” Arnold says. “So there was already a skilled labor force that we could recruit.” Every one of the plant’s employees spent at least 40 hours at the $22 million Kia Georgia Training Center down the road, which houses welding, robotics, and electronics and quality-control labs. And more than two-thirds of those employees have flown to Korea for even more training. Robots weld and stamp panels like in any modern car factory, but there’s a surprising amount of human artistry in a Sorento, Optima, and Hyundai Santa Fe, the three models built here. Consider stoning, for instance. Workers hand-rub fine stones over every tenth door panel that comes through, searching for imperfections. “Any high points will show up bright silver, and low points will be darker,” Arnold says. If they find anything wrong, they rub the entire batch. And the batch that came before that. “We want to catch anything before it gets to paint, because here it’s easier to fix,” he says. I figured this is the sort of job that would be done by laser-eyed Terminator robots the world over. But Honda does this, too, at its plant in Marysville. For quality control, even on the scale of Hondas and Kias, human hands still play a role in the business of smashing metal into shape.

Inconspicuous mechanical platforms assist in the installation of doors. KIA

After any flagged issues are fixed (my loaner Sorento had only one, resolved earlier on, noted as some kind of residue on one of the seats), the car gets four gallons of gas, just enough to test it and move it around en route to the dealer. A diagnostic computer fires the car’s electric synapses while a worker sits behind the wheel pushing buttons on the dash, verifying all the connections. Front-seat coolers: check. The surround-view cameras are calibrated by driving the car into what looks like a Hollywood green-screen room, the Kia employee tapping targets on the dash touchscreen. The car gets an alignment, followed by a high-speed four-wheel dynamometer test to verify engine power and transmission function. Then, it’s outside for a lap around the test track, where a driver checks the antilock brakes, steering, acceleration, suspension, and even the brake’s hill-holder function. Back inside, the Sorento enters a leak-test chamber that looks like an exceptionally ferocious car wash.

But it’s the same question as the stoning: Doesn’t everyone do this? No, not everyone. I’ve seen McLaren dyno test each $200,000-plus supercar. But in Marysville, Honda only spot checks. Kia does this with every car. Tour over, I climb into my Sorento, which has 13 miles on the odometer. I ask Arnold if I need to break it in, take it easy for a few hundred miles. He says there’s no particular break-in period—after all, they gunned it on the dyno test from the first moment the oil was warm. So as I turn onto the highway on-ramp, I floor it, summoning all 290 horses from the 3.3-liter V-6. It’s peppy, the Sorento. But this design has been around a while. Introduced in 2011, it shows its age. The transmission has six gears instead of eight or nine. There’s no electronic lane keeping. And when I stop for gas, there’s a plastic cap to unscrew. Little details remind you that the Sorento is due for an overhaul, but the car is otherwise a fundamentally pleasant companion. The interior is smartly designed—actual knobs for the stereo and HVAC—and quiet on the highway. The Sorento is competent and well made, a car that strives to soothe rather than excite. Kia now knows how to do the latter (see: Stinger) but that’s not the mission for midsize crossovers.

A Sorento like my factory-fresh SX Limited costs $47,140. Paying that much for a Kia makes more sense from the heated and cooled, 14-way adjustable, Nappa-leather-upholstered driver’s seat. KIA

I would cover nearly 1,000 miles before Kia reclaimed the Sorento. Along the way, there were a thousand things that could have gone wrong. But nothing did.

This story appears in the January/February 2018 issue.



Want more Popular Mechanics? Get Instant Access!

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io