Kia hot hatch on the way

Kia's product line-up will be given a boost when the company launches a small performance car in the next 12 months to rival the Volkswagen Golf GTI, likely to be the European-market cee'd.

The Manager for Powertrain Engineering at Kia, Dr Joachim Hahn, told Australian journalists at the 2012 Geneva Motor Show that a small C-segment car will be paired with the company's 1.6-litre turbo petrol engine, saying it will be "...one variant of a C-segment car. It's easy to come out with this concept with 180hp [132kW] and more.

"I cannot give you the info currently in which vehicles the first time the 1.6 turbo GDI will come out in Kia, but I can inform you that it will not be the Rio," said Dr Hahn. However he did mention that turbo petrol Rio's were being considered.

"Yes we should look at turbo engines in Rio. What I can say currently is that we already produce turbocharged GDI engines ... and what we will bring out in Kia in the next 12 months is a European turbocharged GDI engine."

While Kia Australia doesn't offer the new cee'd in this country, the next generation Kia Cerato is likely to be offered with the 1.6-litre turbo petrol engine when it launches in 2013. This hi-po engine will also be offered in 2012 in Kia's sister company Hyundai's Veloster Turbo, outputting around 150kW/264Nm.

Kia's powertrain chief said the engine would find its way into the Optima as well: "Also in future [this 1.6 TGDI engine] will be used as a downsizing concept but then more for D-segment [Optima].

Exact power outputs for Kia's first hot hatch weren't mentioned, but Hahn did hint that various power outputs would eventuate thanks to changes in engine hardware.

"We are lucky that the turbo technologies allow us to adapt more or less to the demand we think the customer has to the engine, which means that a hardware change, especially the size of the turbocharger but also the timing of the camshafts ... in combination with the software ... allows us to play a little bit around with the behaviour of the engine at very low speeds and with the peak power.

"But we know that we are able to give them real sexy and nice drive-away take-off behaviour. Not only by developing a high steady state low end torque but also by having a nice transient behaviour which on a turbo engine also influenced by the inertia of the turbocharger, so that means the smaller the turbocharger is, in this criteria it's a benefit."

Matching the Volkswagen Golf GTI's dual clutch auto gearbox, Kia will also offer its six-speed DCT (dual clutch transmission): "It's also planned to have the DCT transmission which we just are introducing  with the first stage with our GDI engine."

Just as the interview was ending Kia's powertrain boss also hinted at a turbocharged version of its V8 Tau range of engines: "Yes we have a V8 engine in the group, yes this is a serious production engine and yes we are not stopping the refinement of this engine. You can see it is not a dead engine. Also 'charging of the big engine has been tested on the test bench and you can imagine that it is easy to come to a very great power output.

"Of course the powertrain engineers are not alone in the world - we need a car for that [engine]!" he concluded.