Kia is planning to launch a small SUV below its existing Sportage 4×4. Speaking at the launch of the Carens MPV, UK commercial director Yaser Shabsogh told BusinessCar: “There’s probably space for something smaller and that’s something we’re looking at for the future.
“We’re looking to see whether we should be putting a proper B-SUV [small 4×4] into our line-up in future, which gives us a lot of coverage. That would be a good product to get into and we’re probably looking at within the next three to four years.”
He also said that the existing range was in line for a drop in emissions when a new generation of cleaner engines comes into play at the end of the year.
“Our eco strategy is definitely going to develop. The next generation of engines will go into models at the back end of this year and all of them will have significantly lower emissions. We’ll have a Sportage below 130g/km.”
Shabsogh hinted that Kia was in the process of developing a series of low-capacity petrol engines in a similar vein to Ford’s Ecoboost and VW’s TFSI units, describing them as “something we definitely want”.
Speaking about the firm’s corporate sales, Shabsogh said they were up around a third year-on-year. “True fleet was 10,000 units for us last year and I’m not saying we will finish at 15,000 this year but currently we’re running at that.
“Historically we didn’t focus on it [true fleet business] because we didn’t have the infrastructure for it, but three or four years ago we put together an infrastructure that supports fleet.”
He said the efforts made over the past four years to increase corporate business, including a bigger fleet sales team and a larger network of specialist dealers, were now starting to pay off.
“You do all of that and then nothing happens for six months but now we are starting to reap the rewards. We’re now in our third
year of fleet growth and it’s the result of not doing one particular thing but doing many over several years. We had 15 fleet specialist dealers to start with – in 2012 we went up to 20 and in 2013 we’ll go up to 25.”