Best Going Forwards
by David Finlay (20 Feb 08)

Kia's aspirations for the cee'd SW in the UK are modest. Of the three body styles available in the cee'd range (which also includes the five-door hatch and the sportier three-door pro_cee'd), this estate variant is expected to account for less than 10% of sales, mostly to fleet markets. But if the SW isn't necessarily important to many people, it may be important to you, if what you want is a relatively cheap C-segment estate car.

In converting the cee'd from a hatchback to an estate, Kia has devised one brilliant idea and one absolutely lousy one. Let's get the latter out of the way first: in what seems to be an attempt to provide a family resemblance with the other cars, the SW has a thumping great lump of metal diagonally bisecting what would otherwise be a thoroughly acceptable rear side window.

This is an awful piece of design which has a villainous effect on rear visibility. It is so bad that, on one occasion in a supermarket car park, I flatly refused to reverse the car since I reckoned the chances of hitting something - or someone - were too high to be worth the risk. If I had to give one reason for not buying a cee'd SW, this would be it.

This grieves me considerably, since there are many reasons why buying a cee'd SW would actually be a good scheme. For a start, there's the brilliant idea I mentioned earlier; Kia has mounted the tailgate hinges 225mm further forward than in the hatch, so that the tailgate swings out far less when you open it than it might otherwise do. This is very simple but very clever.

Once you've opened the tailgate - and smiled at the low sill and the wide opening - you find that there is a great deal more room than the cee'd hatchback can provide. With the 60/40 split rear seat in place there's 479 litres available, plus a further 55 litres in the form of underfloor storage; with the rear seat folded flat the potential rises to a very useful 1664 litres, which compares very well with more obviously popular C-segment estates such as the Ford Focus and Vauxhall Astra.

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