Kia Rio 1.5 CRDi LX review
by David Finlay (6 April 2006)
My early enthusiasm for the Rio is becoming more difficult to justify. When I first wrote a
road test of the 1.5 LX turbo diesel last September, on the basis of a day's driving, I reckoned it represented great value for money as long as you didn't have to pay as much as £10,000 for it. Without metallic paint or the Dynamic pack option, the 1.5 LX had a list price at that time of £8995, and that seemed perfectly reasonable.
A lot has happened since then. First, worldwide demand for the car proved to be higher than the company was expecting, and Kia Motors UK realised that its reduced allocation (down from 15,000 to just 6000 for this year) meant the original pricing structure no longer made financial sense. Nor did the price parity between petrol and diesel models, which was originally one of the main selling points.
The 1.5 LX immediately became £1000 more expensive, and more recently - while I was driving the test car, in fact - Kia announced a further £300 increase, due to the weakness of Sterling against the South Korean won.
The result is that the Rio 1.5 LX now costs £10,295. Add in the metallic paint and the Dynamic pack, and that goes up to £11,595. This is still by no means premium money for a small hatchback, but it does mean that the Rio has been put in the ring with, for example, equivalent versions of the Fiat Punto, Mitsubishi Colt, Peugeot 206, smart forfour, SEAT Ibiza and Skoda Fabia, not one of which would have been considered a direct rival back in the £8995 days.
There's still a lot to be said in the Rio's favour. It's quite an attractive little car, it's easy to drive, luggage capacity is as much as 1145 litres if you fold down the rear seats, and in the case of the turbo diesel model the performance is outstanding, with huge mid-range urge combined with excellent fuel economy. More generally, I still think the Rio offers what I described in my earlier test as "undramatic competence".
But for the amount of money Kia is now asking I think I want more than that. While the Rio's general air of quality felt suitable for a car costing less than £9000, it feels a bit low-rent now. Its abilities, in some cases startling when it was cheap, seem average now that it's not so cheap. And now that Kia has breached the £10k barrier, it's definitely time to do something about the ride quality.
Some of the time, the Rio's ride isn't too bad, but when you're pushing on (and oh my, how you can push on with that diesel unit blasting away under the bonnet) the nose can too easily start bouncing in an alarming fashion. I've said before that the Rio feels well composed in more gentle motoring, but it took until this much longer drive to find that the bounce can become apparent at very low speeds. Hit a small bump in town and the suspension can sometimes react disproportionately as the bonnet leaps into orbit and then drops back to earth.
There is so much movement that it can start to affect the drivetrain as if you were charging along a series of closely-spaced sleeping policemen. Several times, having put a wheel on something as apparently inoffensive as a manhole cover, I found myself kangarooing through urban areas at 20mph; if my old driving instructor had happened to see this, I'm sure he would have wanted to take me away for a quick refresher course on clutch control.
That really has to be fixed - it wouldn't mean fitting more expensive suspension parts to the Rio, just correctly adjusting what's already there. The perceived value of the car would certainly improve, but whether it would help justify the full £1300 increase over the past few months is another matter entirely.
The only way to do that would be to start designing the car from scratch, which obviously isn't going to happen, or bring the price back down. That can only happen if availability improves, or if the won fades against the pound on the currency markets. Kia Motors UK must be fervently hoping that either, or both, of these things will happen soon.
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