Auto Mundial (yep you’ve probably never heard of them) is a TV motoring magazine program that’s shown in over 40 countries worldwide.
Well they’ve spent the last 12 months testing and reporting on cars from all over the world and from a group that included the BMW M3, the Porsche 911 and 4×4’s and city cars, they have decided that the Kia Pro Ceed, for them, is the car of the year.
Pause a little now, so you can catch your breath and reflect on all the different cars that could have been in the running for this award, whilst I tell you that the programs verdict is based on what they refer to as ‘anything that’s crossed our path in the last 52 weeks’.
Auto Mundial said “That means the Kia, which stood out not just for its looks and driving entertainment but also for technical innovations, was matched against cars as diverse as the Porsche 911 and the BMW M3, beating all of them to the top of the podium on a range of criteria which had to include price and purpose.” They said “It would have been easy to give the award to an expensive saloon or sports car, but we always felt we had to look deeper than power and performance.”
Journalist on the Auto Mundial programme, Richard Nichols, said; “The fact that the Kia defeated the BMW M3 is a clear indication of its all-round excellence. We were all convinced the BMW would be hard to beat, if not impossible, but in the end the Kia pro_cee’d was clearly the winner.”
The three door Kia pro_cee’d, which comes with a choice of 1.6-litre petrol and diesel and a 2.0-litre diesel engines, only went on sale in early 2008 and has been a runaway success ever since.
Designed, developed, engineered and built in Europe, the pro_cee’d is the only three door car on sale in Europe with a seven year, 100,000-mile warranty.
Here in the UK, Kia Motors is headed up by its Managing Director Paul Philpott, who himself knows a thing or two about the motor industry and is indeed a very impressive chap. Paul Philpott said “This global award is recognition for the hard work and dedication our design, development and manufacturing teams have put into creating this European product. We’ve been saying for some time that the pro_cee’d is very special – a Kia you can brag about to your mates in the pub. Now it’s beaten the likes of 911 and M3 to this award, it just goes to show that you need good value and excellent quality, not just horsepower, to create a winning performance.”
Now we all know that voting on anything is about opinion, and whilst no one can question their right to their opinion, it does show you just how diversified views are within this industry, as the Pro Cee’d didn’t even figure in the final 37 candidates for the European Car of the Year Award announced recently.
