Kia Rio > All?
 

2013 Hatchback EX about 16.5k

For the wife. She likes its looks.

1.6 direct injection NA. We prefer a manual gearbox, but can not get it without the base trim.

What say you?


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The older (and shittier) ones are fun to throw around. Manual steering, manual trans, as basic as the DOT will let them be.


The new kia/hyundai's are pretty boring to drive (IMO), but have good reliability. Cheaper initial cost usually bites you in the ass for resale.

Look into resale, around me a Fit, Yaris or Mazda2 will sell for pretty much what a new base model is after a couple years but a Hyundai or Kia will not.

I just looked up local pricing, base $14.2k and a loaded one of these is $22.2k!? for a subcompact, a korean subcompact? Although I can get any trim level in manual.

In addition, Kia calls for timing belt intervals at 60K...wonder why?

They probably also tell you to change the oil every 3k miles.

Ford Fiesta
Toyota Yaris
Nissan Versa
Mazda 2

All of these things cost about the same (or less), are available with a manual gearbox, and aren't a Kia.

5000

But they will void your warranty if do not have documentation for the timing belt and waterpump at 60K.

nough said

I test drove a 2012 Kia Rio briefly last July when I was looking for a new car. I was underwhelmed by it in all way shapes and forms. I picked up a base model Mazda2 with the 5speed and I could not be happier with it. I have put a little over 10k miles on it and it has been a blast. Only thing I have had to do on it was change the oil and put in a little extra air in the tires this past weekend.

fiesta>rio

Drove the forte koup. Looked decent. But felt, like a toy. From the way it was built, to the way it drove.

Wait...

What the hell happened?

When I lived in the US, Kia Rio was somewhat of a joke. Back in 2004, a new car was in the $20K range (average) and the Rio was offered for $5999 in all its tin can glory.

At one point in the not too distant past weren't they giving away a free rio with the purchase of one of the larger sedans? Maybe that was Suzuki.

I like the way the new Kia's look and the specs look good on paper, but have heard not good things from people who own them.

Kia has come a long way.

Having wrenched on some previous years of this car I was seriously shocked at how terrible and cheap they were. This is a big improvement.

Kia still has a long way to go.

Resale value is a big indicator at how well a car holds up long term, which in turn is a good indicator of build quality. Kia and Hyundai throw a ton of cool looking doo-dads onto the cars, but after 20k when all those cheap plastics and pleathers are wearing down and tearing down, you realize why it was so much cheaper initially.

New Honda Fit with a 5 speed > Kia Rio

We were actually just shopping in the same market as OP: Compact hatch/etc.

Ended up with a '10 Prius IV loaded with all options. Paid high teens for it. COULD NOT BE HAPPIER with the decision. Hataz gonna hate.

Kia's are the most uncomfortable cars. Everything you would ever touch is a hard plastic. Even the seats feel like they were molded out of recycled tupperware.

Did this replace the TSX?

How many cars do you have, jeez...

LOL yes, actually sold the TSX yesterday.
Currenly only 3

The reason I'm raving about the Prius, is cause it is uber comfy, gets 51mpg consistently, uber spacious, and has every single bell and whistle you can think of (navi, back up camera, bluetooth, sattelite, smart-key, solar roof panels, etc etcetc too much crap to list).

It actually handles pretty decent for what it is too, I was expecting it to be a complete pig, its no worse than our previous 05 civic hybrid. And its actually got grunt at low speeds, esp when you hit the "PWR" button. It shuts off any time you're stopped, and the a/c is electric.

Lots of other stuff, like I said way too much to list, and we got a '10 with all options for what we woulda paid for a '12 yaris or fit with like 10% of the features this thing has.

Its also a huge step up from the previous pre-10 prii (sp?)

Sorry for the ramble..My point is you can get a couple year old one of these with low mileage for the price of that Kia, and its 300% better.

If not, I'd echo what has already been said: mazda2, fit, yaris, fiesta, etc are all better options to the kia.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1364484784



The versa is a crime against humanity. And the Yaris isn't much better.

I had a Mazda2 as a rental car about a year ago in Phoenix. The automatic transmission was underwhelming (no surprise there) but in every other way, I was really quite amazed by how horrible the car wasn't. I initially cringed when they gave it to me, but it turned out to be a very comfortable place to sit, handled reasonably well, and seemed very well put together.

Even though the Demio platform is assembled in some really screwy places (Thailand, Columbia, Vietnam, etc) there's something to be said for being competently designed and built of reasonable-quality materials in a plant designed and managed by people who know the difference between good shit and bad shit.


A friend of mine down in FL has some Kia sedan of relatively recent vintage (2008 maybe?) and while it has only slightly over 100,000 miles on it, it's more or less falling apart. The drivetrain is fine, but it's developed all sorts of little squeaks and rattles, the interior is coming to pieces, the A/C has crapped out twice, etc.


Kia is still an emerging company, regardless of what they'd like you to think. They are the automotive equivalent of the guy selling knockoff Louis Vuitton purses from a little kiosk on the street in Chinatown. Sure, they look a lot like the real thing, but they're poorly assembled from inferior materials.


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The Jaguar X-type was a crime against humanity, being essentially a re-badged Ford Contour, which was itself a thoroughly awful car.

What, specifically, makes the Versa and Yaris substantially more horrible than the Rio? The reviews which I've read criticize them for being under-powered and sort of bland-feeling, but this is a character trait which I associate with all cheap hatchbacks in general.

The 80s-vintage Rabbit Diesel was by no means a fast and nimble car, but if you look up the word "reliable" in most dictionaries, they have a picture of it below the definition.

The auto's in the Mazda2's are a complete piece of crap. My good friend's wife has an auto and he has a manual. There is a night and day difference between them. He will not even drive the wives car at all.

I think the Fiesta is the best car in the class, with the Fit a close second. Those roles can change depending on your needs. The Fiesta gets better mileage and has more power but the Fit has more space and better resale value.

KIA still not up to par IMO, and I almost bought a Soul last time I was car shopping (bought a used Jet ta TDI instead and don't regret it for a second).

Jeremy Clarkson would seem to agree with you, and that's saying a lot.





Pretty much.

Right now, Kia makes aspirational cars for poor people. You can walk in with your one-step-above-minimum-wage job, sign a few papers, and drive away in a car loaded with the same gizmos and gadgets that your college-educated friends have in their Hondae and Lexii, feeling pretty good about yourself.

The difference is that a few years down the road, everything about the Hondae and Lexii will still be working properly, not rattling, etc. Your hamstermobile, by comparison, will have gone the way of the knockoff handbag, looking a bit threadbare and starting to tear at the seams.

There's a very good reason that some cars have a higher average resale value than others.

I don't know that the difference is as great as you state, but I do believe that there is a difference for sure.

Thing about price... The new Rio starts at just a hair under $14k. So does the Fiesta (sedan... Hatch is like $800 more). Fit starts at, what, $14.5k? Mazda2 at $14k ? The KIA isn't saving you any money!

I paid $14800 out the door for my new base model Mazda 2. It was the $1400 invoice and then $800 for tax, title, registration and all.

My beef with the mazda2 is that you can get more space with better fuel economy and more power with the Fiesta, or more space with about the same power and economy with the Fit. Basically I'm disappointed with the size, power and fuel economy of the mazda2.

Yup. Ironic, isn't it? They started low; might have been a loss-leader for all I know. But now they've come up to parity price-wise while still lagging in the quality department. Not to mention the stigma attached to the brand with regard to resale.

Think of it this way: If you live outside the rust-belt, the secondary market is saturated with 20 year old Hondoyotazdas that are running fine, passed their last emission inspection with no problem, and still feel like they're not falling apart.

How many Daewoos of the same vintage do you see for sale?


Here's what it boils down to:

If you watch enough car commercials on TV, you see a lot of automakers touting that such-and-such model won an award from J.D. Power for best something-or-other. It's like playing little league baseball in third grade, where everybody gets a ribbon just for showing up.

But here's the thing. Inasmuch as these awards are a valuable measure of anything at all, it's interesting to note which automakers claim which awards.

The Koreans, for the most part love to talk about their Initial Quality ranking, meaning that you got a lot of stuff for your money and it lasted at least 12 months without breaking. (Literally, that's what the Initial Quality award measures.) They tend not so much to mention long-term dependability, resale value, etc.

No one yet has mentioned the turbo sonic. I have never been in one, but it's turbo...?

Fuck needing to use premium gas in my DD.

the dash is cool:

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https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-V...4/DSC_6009.JPG

Seeing those pictures brings to my mind a question:

Why do most automakers elect to locate the starting battery within the engine compartment, very near to many sources of heat? All else being equal, high ambient temperatures tend to increase the rate of degradation of a flooded battery.

oh look they took the speedo right out of a motorcycle

And Mazda went from the trunk to the engine compartment when they brought out the NC. They save the wire and we buy the batteries when they fail.:vash:

Back to Kia: I haven't found any major problems with the 2 Sportages and one Borrego I own and have owned. Brakes on the first Sportage required replacing too early, but the second Sportage and Borrego have served me very well.

a green mazda 2 was a jeopardy question the other day. my wife wanted to make sure I told you.

By the time you get a turbo model you're around 20k.

While I am not refuting your premise, I do have to stand up for one particular model of Kia based on personal experience: the current generation Optima. Along your line of thought that they are an emerging brand, you cannot necessarily look at the resale value of a 2008 Optima and project that on to a 5-year old 2013 Optima.

2010 2nd gen Optima
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2011 3rd gen Optima
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You are right to make the distinction between initial and long-term quality and reliability but I would point out that there has been a pretty big evolutionary jump in the last couple of years. Whether that holds up long term, no one can accurately say at the moment.

In other words, beware recency bias. :)

That 2013 Optima screams ricer.....

I mean holy shit. The wheels alone....

If true, then this, in and of itself, is further evidence for my claims. When great discrepancies exist between the value of a durable good over a short time span, this indicates that the market perceives the value of that brand to be unstable.

Now, to an extent I acknowledge that this is a variant on the 1960's era IBM argument. (Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.) And we all know how that story ended. But given the choice between buying a car from a company with a history of producing reliable vehicles and one of which it can be said that "They've gotten a lot less bad over the past five years..."

Because people EXPECT the battery to be under the hood not in the trunk. You have to give people what they want, regardless of how little sense it makes. Remember the video card thread? ;) As we all learned from the NA & NB series Miata, the average consumer (m.net) does not want to buy a new $160 WestCo or AGM battery when they can go buy a $75 wet cell at WalMart and then blame Mazda when it explodes and/or vents acid into their trunk.

I wanted to like the optima

but when i look at the side of a NEW kia optima, all I see is:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1364505929

PANEL LINE PANEL LINE PANEL LINE PANEL LINE.

Seriously, it looks like it was designed by spider man with all that webby shit.

find me a car on the road that does the trunk lid edge on the side of the car where the world can see it in all its liney-ness. And while you're at it, hey guys, lets put the hood edge on the side too. and end the doors like 3 inches from a natural shadow line.

panel line.

To be fair, Mazda did not help the situation when they started selling the infamous blue-label battery as an "OEM-equivalent" replacement part at the north American service centers.

That said, I have been too cheap and lazy to do anything about the flooded battery (Duralast) which came installed in my '90 when I bought it. That battery has got to be at least 4-5 years old at this point, and it's still rockin'. It has out-lasted both the Westco AGM and the subsequent Optima Red that I put in the '92.

Kia offers a standard 7 year 150,000 km transferable warranty for cars built in Zilina.
Quality is the one thing you don't need to worry about.

7 year warranty | Kia Motors Ireland

Wife: I told you not to post that, you knew they were going to hate on it. You could have told them you were going to buy a Porsche and it would have been the same thing.


She gets home in a few minutes. Then we are going to the dealership to overpay for a kia.

make sure to lube up and don't clench

the salesman might go in dry

I don't know how anyone could look at resale values for the cars in this class and pick anything but the FIT.

Financially, it has by far the lowest cost of ownership in this class.

Even if it costs you $2k more up front, look at what a 6 year old fit is worth versus a 6 year old small ford or small kia, or versa, etc. etc.

Everyone raves about the Fiesta (ST looks interesting...) but the average transaction price for Fiestas is over $20k or something stupid like that. Equally equipped the Fiesta is expensive...

average transaction price for Fiestas over 20k? highly doubt it.

If I were buying a car in that class, it would be the Fit. Space trumps for me. But I'm also disappointed with the fuel economy so who knows.

more room and better economy? have you seen the thread split from this one? lol :D

This article is a bit older but this is what I was referring to:

Report: Ford Fiesta transaction prices higher than current Focus, Civic and Corolla

Apparently it was $18k, so shoot me.

According to this article the average transaction price of the Fiesta was higher than the Civic in that month.

Seriously? People were getting Fiestas for the same the could have a Civic? And they were doing this to buy a small cheap car?

In reply to the Sonic, it's also a Daewoo, just like the Chevy Cruze is a Daewoo, and also Korean.

I've been to the u-pull-it recently for something and a friend asked me to look for some Kia interior parts while I was there. His girlfriend has one and ALL of the interior plastics have disintegrated. The dash vents and their retainers have fallen apart and fallen out. The dash has cracked and sections are missing entirely. The ones in the junkyard were no help because they were all similarly disintegrating. I hoped they learned how to make good plastic since then.

Can't tell whether it is my hangover or buyers remorse that just woke me on my day off at 5am.

With a face like that it's gotta be buyer's remorse. http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...SJZYoBZTOAq9Mg

dude................:laugh:

https://www.miataturbo.net/general-m...81/#post995457

https://www.miataturbo.net/engine-pe...54/#post995259

LOL I didn't catch that. Did FowlerMotorsports build a shitty locost with a 1.6 motor? It all makes sense now!

Definitely buyer's remorse...

That or the nagging realization that you ignored every good bit of advice in this thread.

Bahahaha I love the KIA theme that is happening. The irony of the builder of the POS icantdo55 bought... Now works for KIA... Unbelievable. I bet he designed the suspension under the new Rio. Hey, didn't someone on this board just buy a Rio?

Trololololol