What is it?
It’s amazing the amount of fanfare a new logo gets. Not only does the announcement garner a bizarre amount of traffic on our website, but the recent Kia rebrand even managed to earn its maker a Guinness World Record for ‘most unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) launching fireworks simultaneously’.
And then, of course, there’s all the faff that goes with it. All the branding and stationery needs to be updated, every dealership needs to redo all the signwriting on their sites, and that’s even before you get to the cars.
So here we find ourselves, staring at the facelifted Kia Ceed hatch with the new logo. And also trying to work out what else has been changed. The bumpers have been ‘re-profiled’, which is normally corporate speak for ‘altered ever so slightly’. And it’s no different with the Kia - instead of a black section in front of the wheel that mimicked an aero opening, we’ve now got a more angular slash and foglight. The grille’s also been tweaked with a different chrome treatment.
The changes are less dramatic at the rear, if that’s the right adjective, to the point where I couldn’t tell the difference and I had old and new images overlaid on each other. Not that this really matters - the Ceed was a pretty decent looking thing before and remains so.
Inside, there’s a new touchscreen design with a simpler layout, but thankfully they’ve still retained physical controls for the volume and temperature control. There’s even a cigarette-lighter power socket, still, in addition to the USB port - if nothing else, the surprise you get when finding that shows how much car interiors have come along in the past few years.
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They seem to have everything else sorted though - except the strange desire to use of the letter D in petrol engined vehicle denominations.
Agree the engines do seem to come in for some criticism of inflexibility or sometimes harshness, I wonder if non road testers really notice though? After all we aren't jumping from one car to another all the time to necessarily pick up in these foibles.