Every Monday we’re serving you up a delicious slice of pure postulation. That’s right, once a week we’re using our expertise and passion for the subject to predict what motors are destined for classic car stardom. This week, Parkers finance editor and former Classic Car Weekly news editor, Murray Scullion proposes the Kia Pride.
Did you know Kia’s sold more than a million cars in the UK? In fact, the South Korean firm achieved the milestone more than two years ago. If this titbit passed you by, we bet some of Kia’s cars have as well. But lately the carmaker has really been shaking things up here. There’s the rear-wheel-drive 365bhp Stinger, for instance.
But where would any of this be without the Kia Pride? It was the first car Kia brought to UK shores, and it’s a feat of badge-engineering that makes the sorts of people who find trains interesting weak at the knees too.
Kia Pride: History
The year was 1991. John Major was the PM, the World Wide Web had been released and South Korea wanted to bring a small car over to the UK. Kia introduced its car to virtually no fanfare. After all, the Hyundai Pony had pipped the Kia to become the first South Korean car sold in the UK.
The Pride was designed for the same clientele as the Pony – the bargain-hunters of UK who didn’t care about badges. Speaking of which, the Pride was about as badge engineered as you could get. Underneath the Kia badging, the Pride is a rehashed Mazda 121, itself a Ford Festiva if you were in North America.
The British public weren’t put off by this. In its first year, the Pride sold 1,786 cars in the UK. While this is some way off the bestselling car of this year (the Ford Fiesta, 117,139 sales) there’s no denying this was a pretty big coup for the small firm.
Amazingly the little Kia survived until 2000, with little to no changes through its lifetime. Except for the introduction of whitewall tyres. Your guess is as good as ours with that one.
Kia Pride: rarity
Rarity is a strong pull in the classic scene. It’s the difference between something everyday and something special. And the Pride does have rarity on its side. Although sales were deemed a relative success, the Pride was never a runaway hit like a Ford Fiesta. Kia only shifted around 22,000 cars over its nine-year sales period in the UK.
According to howmanyleft there are just 76 Kia Prides registered on the road now. The reason so few survived can be chalked up to simple economics – they became uneconomical to repair. Dare we say it, like a lot of cars associated with this column, the Kia Pride’s numbers were greatly affected by the great scrappage cull of 2009.
Why should you care?
The Kia Pride was the car that kicked things off for the brand in the UK. But despite being an important, if small, footnote in the British car industry, there isn’t a lot of love out there for the Kia Pride. As shown by its rarity, not many people bothered keeping them alive.
Another reason to care about this little Kia, and other small, cheap, utilitarian types of cars, is that at some point, they might become extinct forever. Beyond this, one reason you should really consider a Kia Pride is that they’re cheap, reliable, and a completely off the wall alternative to a small classic.
And best of all, the Pride makes a great starter classic. The sort of car to ingratiate someone into the classic car scene. It’s easy to drive, plus, the low-powered 1.1-litre and 1.3-litre petrol engines ensures it’s cheap to insure. At time of writing, Kia Prides for sale are hard to track down. But don’t expect to pay much more than £500 for one with MoT.
The CCfS Classic Car Prediction
Ah yes, the prediction. If the internet is much to go by, interest for the Kia Pride is very slowly gaining momentum. But we reckon it’s still a good few years off being welcomed into the wide world of classic car acceptance. We’d give it a good ten years before mainstream weekend classic car shows welcome in Kia Prides, and even then, they’ll only be letting in early mint condition cars.
We expect slightly more left-field events to be more forgiving. The Pride is still too new for events like Hagerty’s Festival of the Unexceptional, although we bet if you turned up with one it’d garner a lot of attention in the car park. For now, if you’re keen on a Pride and would like to take it to shows, look for smaller regional events, or stuff specifically aimed at the budget end of the classic car market.
