Sporty Sportage

My 2005 Kia Sportage was built in Korea, and then shipped by boat to Tacoma, Wash., where it caught a truck for Kia’s U.S. home base in Irvine, Calif. How it then made it to the East Coast is a mystery to me, but it arrived wearing California plates.

In the future, Kia SUVs might not have to travel so far. If you weren’t paying attention or if automotive news from Korea is just not on your radar screen, you probably missed the fact that the very ambitious Hyundai, which has North America very much in its sights, now owns Kia. Hyundai is building both a design center in Detroit and a huge $1 billion factory in Montgomery, Ala., to make the Sonata sedan and Santa Fe SUV. (Note that my Sportage has only 4 percent U.S./Canada content, a figure that the company no doubt wants to improve.) Hyundai wants to sell a million cars per year in the U.S. by 2010, a lofty goal considering that GM only sells 4.7 million.

The Sportage is based on the same platform as the $18,000 Hyundai Tucson, but it looks more like a Honda Pilot in my eyes. For $20,000, the Sportage buyer gets a wide range of standard features, including six curtain airbags, stability control, traction control and four-wheel anti-lock disc brakes with electronic brake distribution. Even the MP3/CD player, sunroof, air conditioning and keyless entry are standard. My test car added a $1,300 "luxury package" that included heated leather front seats and body-keyed bumpers, for a grand total of $21,889.

Kia is competing aggressively on price and features, going after the Ford Escape, Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4. I’ll have to admit that with the luxury package, it does feel distinctly upmarket from those familiar brand names. The cockpit of the Sportage is a nice place to be, and the quality materials feel European.

The test car came with the optional 173-horsepower, 2.7-liter V6, and Kia is all too happy to point out that a six-cylinder engine is not available in the CR-V or RAV4. The motor certainly helps the vehicle leap off the line – I couldn’t believe how it sprinted away when I lead-footed it during a traffic-congested run to the office. But the 140-horsepower four is adequate to the task, too. With a six cylinder, the Sportage’s fuel economy suffers enormously, at 19 MPG in town and 25 on the highway. (The RAV4 delivers 24/30, and that matters in these fuel-stressed times.)

Kia President Peter M. Butterfield offers an analogy: He likens his products to BMW and Hyundai’s to Mercedes. Kia is sporty, Hyundai luxury, or at least that’s the future concept. Today, most Americans think of Korean vehicles as entry level, hence the campaign to change their minds.

The Kia Sportage will probably change some opinions in that it’s a very credible and affordable SUV with a peppy V6, loads of standard equipment, excellent handling and a near-luxury interior. Hyundai/Kia’s challenge is to make sure the quality goes in before the name goes on. Right now it does well in initial quality studies by J.D. Power, but falls off in the three-year-old dependency rankings. This Sportage feels very tight to me, but who knows what will fall off as it goes through the wringer in the American commuting rat race.