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Kia's rear-wheel-drive Stinger was undoubtedly the surprise hit of this year's Detroit Auto Show. With great design and a Nurburgring-tuned chassis, it finally looks like Kia has made a car with the sort of people that read Road & Track in mind. Even legendary auto executive Bob Lutz is into it.
The Stinger has the BMW 4-Series in its sights, but it wants to offer similar goodness at a much lower price. Kia is at least a few months away from announcing definitive pricing, but the automaker's American product planning VP Orth Hedrick told Road & Track the Stinger will undercut its competition by a significant margin.
"We're probably going to be starting in the low-$30,000s," said Hedrick at the Detroit Auto Show. "We'll probably have a little bit more information closer to launch, but all in [for a six-cylinder Stinger GT], probably under $50,000."
For reference, the four-cylinder BMW 430i Grand Coupe starts at nearly $42,000, whereas a six-cylinder 440i Grand Coupe has a base price closer to $50,000. That makes the Kia quite a bargain compared to the car its benchmarking, but don't expect to be shortchanged by the Stinger.
With this car, you get the impression that Kia is truly onto something good. Kia of course, has great things to say about its newest product, but there's also a refreshing amount of modesty in the company line.
"We wanted to make sure that the vehicle drives as good as it looks?that it can fulfill the promise," said Hedrick. "You could argue maybe some of our other cars didn't live up to that as much as we would have hoped, and because of Albert Biermann and our core engineering competency getting better, we've achieved that."
You hear Albert Biermann's name come up a lot when anyone talks about the Stinger. Officially, Biermann's job title is Head of Vehicle Test & High Performance Development, but it might as well be Chassis Guru. Hyundai?which owns Kia?poached Biermann back in 2014 from BMW Motorsport, where he led the development of the most recent M3 and M5.
He's responsible for making sure that Kia and Hyundai's latest products have dynamics to match their European rivals. For the Stinger, Biermann spent a lot of time developing the chassis on the Nurburgring, but don't think of it as a track car. It's a high-speed cruiser designed to eat up highway miles like the best European GT cars of the 1970s.
"This is no high-performance car," Biermann told us. "You can drive it on the race track, of course, but you cannot drive it on the race track and push it like a high-performance car. The car is not developed for that."
Instead, Biermann suggests that the Stinger is meant mainly for places like the German Autobahn, but it's also at home on a back road.
"The magic of the Stinger is that it has this high-speed stability from the long wheelbase," said Biermann. "If you go around some tight corners on a tight, mountain road, you don't feel the Stinger being a big car. It's very nimble, very agile, and easy to control."
This sort of talk isn't out of place at the reveal of a German luxury car, but hearing people from Kia speak this way is refreshing. Of course, we'll need to put their claims to the test, but there's good reason to be optimistic about the Stinger. It's taking aim at German luxury, but it's doing so from a new direction.
Kia, you officially have our attention.
Read more on Road and Track.
