My next car is going to be a Kia RIO

[ElFenix]

The new Kias look great... Clean edgy styling. Much better than the organic fish crap that Hyundai, Mazda, and Subaru are putting out.

the optima look like a mish mash of a 5 year old IS350 and a 5 year old civic. nothing clean or edgy about it.

Sonata != Kia.

same drive train. and kia has downmarket tolerances and qc.

 

[SniperWulf]

Not really impressed. But I do like Kia Optima.

I agree, the lines on that new Optima are the hotness. I was pleasantly surprised

 

[exar333]

around here, most of the hyundai dealers are 'normal' car dealers, but any other kia dealers have been edged out by 'carnival kia,' who has three locations and pretty much will not sell to you if you have good credit and/or know what you want/want to haggle price/ect. their sole market is poor people with bad credit who they can sell cars at terrible prices to and finance them at ridiculous interest rates.

You are exactly right.

Two years back a co-worker bought a new Kia after trading-in their existing car. They got screwed on the trade-in value, and Kia was more than happy to take their negative equity from the previous car (not paid off) and tack it on to the new Kia. End result was they got a $13k car and immediately owed ~22k on it. I wish I had know before this all happened and I could have prevented it...

A similar story happened about 5-6 years ago at a Kia dealership, relating a a friend's gf. This happened before they started dating, and my buddy was blown-away when he found out about the issues.

Kia dealerships are sleazy as hell, and they will do anything to get you a car. That includes bad loans and horrible service. Look at rental Kias with about 50-10k on them, they are already falling apart and drive like crap. A similar Impala/Camry/etc. still looks like new (as it should) and drives well.