Kia Australia pledges to continue selling sub-$20K cars

Kia Australia executives insist they’re not walking away from affordable cars any time soon, pledging to continue offering sub-$20,000 vehicles Down Under while it’s sustainable.

While other car-makers exit Australia’s micro-car segment, which now includes only the pint-size Kia Picanto and the soon-to-be-replaced Fiat 500 range, the Kia Rio remains one of only three light-car models to remain priced from under $20,000.

And in the same week the Korean brand staged the local debut of its first six-figure car, the $99,590 (plus on-road costs) Kia EV6 GT high-performance electric SUV, Kia Australia chief operating officer Damien Meredith stressed the importance of keeping Kia’s traditional customer base engaged with the brand.

“We made a conscious decision that we would keep our passenger range when a lot of our competitors have left that segment,” Meredith said.

“We held onto the view that we still wanted to have vehicles under $19,990, and we’re still just achieving that but it’s getting harder – and that’s outside our immediate control.

“I think it’s important. You can get a little bit carried away selling cars to Rose Bay but we still want to sell cars in Penrith. We want to be a holistic brand, we don’t want to be a specific brand – we think we can do that with our product line-up and with what we’re doing with the brand.

“Do we want to keep on improving the brand and make it more appealing? Absolutely, but we think we can do that on a wide base.”

The Picanto is Kia Australia’s cheapest model, priced from $15,990 plus on-road costs, but will undergo a mid-life facelift in 2023, which is likely to put more pressure on Kia keeping its price promise.

“What we think is that the new Kia EV6 GT will help us sell more Picantos, because what it does is drive interest. One of our biggest challenges is our perceived quality versus actual quality, and that helps bridge that gap,” said Kia Australia head of marketing Dean Norbiato.

“We do a lot of research and focus groups, and people are literally saying ‘I saw the Stinger, I saw the EV6 and I went in and bought a Picanto… there’s a brand association there and it’s all building up to the Kia badge.

“We don’t want to splinter off into performance brands and sub-brands, we’re all in on investing in the Kia brand and having cars at each end under the same umbrella.”

Kia continues to grow its outright volume and market share in Australia, where its lies third in the 2022 sales race behind only Toyota and Mazda – and ahead of Mitsubishi and sister brand Hyundai for the first time – with 72,700 sales to November.

It hopes its growing EV portfolio and first ever ute will eventually take its annual sales to more than 100,000 vehicles, which would see it threaten Mazda.

“We think we can grow a little bit more in terms of volume. We’ll probably do 77,000 or 78,000 cars this year. We think we can grow a little bit more next year,” said Meredith.

“We always set ourselves from a market share point of view and a volume point of view to grow consistently each year – obviously, apart from the COVID-19 affected years.”

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