Kia's EV Concept for Geneva Has a New Kia Logo and Lights for a Grille
Kia has released this teaser photo of a sporty electric concept ahead of its Geneva auto show debut.
The car has a light-up logo that uses a type font new to Kia.
Kia of Europe's vice president of design promises that the brand's EVs can be sporty, too.
Kia is preparing to reveal a new concept car at the Geneva auto show next month, and the brand has released a teaser of the unnamed concept. Almost no details about the car have been given beyond that it's all electric, so all that we have to go on is this shadowy photo and some quotes from Gregory Guillaume, Kia's vice president of design in Europe.
Luckily, we can actually see quite a lot in the image. The EV is very low slung, with a wide stance and bulging fenders. The front fenders themselves actually have an interesting visible design element: There's a crease on the fenders near the edges of the wheel arches that could give the car a mock body-cladding vibe or help to make the arches look bigger and sportier than they already are. Also visible are thin black elements at the edges of the hood that are probably air vents, small cameras in place of side mirrors, and weirdly ribbed surfacing at the lower air intakes. But the most noticeable part of the design is the grille-or, well, the lack of one.
It has now been over a decade since Kia introduced the "tiger nose" grille, which usually is a long rectangular shape that has two notches in the center, at the top and the bottom. Those notches are more pronounced on some models than others-look below at the Stinger versus the K900, for instance-but they're always present. On this concept, though, the tiger nose has been turned into the lighting itself. A singular LED strip in the exaggerated tiger nose shape is the most prominent feature of the front end, spanning almost the entire width of the front end, and the innards are surrounded by what looks like chrome. Two thin LED strips, one on each side of the interior of the "grille," most likely act as the actual headlights.
There is one other element visible in this teaser that really caught our eye. You might already know that, here at C/D, we have a thing for super minor design details like new fonts. At this year's Detroit auto show, we chatted with the Telluride's lead designer and brought up our disdain for Kia's generic logo, and he agreed that it deserves to be changed. Well, it looks like Kia's European design arm also agrees, as the traditional oval Kia logo is nowhere to be found on this new concept. In its place is the brand name written in a new, connected, futuristic font at the front edge of the hood. Oh, and it's lit up, too, in keeping with the latest trends in electrified concepts. We really hope that this modern new font and logo will appear on future Kia production models.
Talking about the new concept, Guillaume says that there's no reason a car's design shouldn't make your heart race just because it's electric. "We imagined designing an all-electric car that not only answered consumer concerns around range, performance, recharging networks and driving dynamism, but one that also gave you goose bumps when you looked at it and made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when you drove it." What we took away from that flowery statement: Kia wants electric cars to be exciting. We can't argue with that.
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