Car Gazing
By Derek Price
Does what I say about this car really matter?
Seriously. This is a Kia. I could say it's powered by water, goes 500 mph, flies up to 30,000 feet, has a trunk filled to the brim with diamonds and comes with your choice of a free Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt, but that wouldn't matter one bit. It's still a Kia, and you still wouldn't drive it.
Things get even more complicated by the fact that this is – brace yourself – a Kia luxury car. That's like buying the finest suit at Wal-Mart, getting the best education in Mississippi or having the straightest teeth in Arkansas. It's not exactly something you want to brag about.
Called the Amanti, this rolling oxymoron actually has some very nice qualities. Its drivetrain, for instance, is absolutely fabulous.
You can't hear the engine at idle – just like a Rolls Royce – and it moves with the kind of grace you'd expect to find in a Lexus or Mercedes, with imperceptible shifts and a very refined burst of power available whenever your right foot demands.
It's also unbelievably comfortable, far more so than you'd expect from anything with a Korean badge.
I spent around 24 hours behind the wheel of this car spread over three days. After all that time, driving more than 1,400 miles on the highway, I still felt perfectly comfortable in the driver's seat. The whole trip was smooth and quiet, even through Louisiana, where they make their roads from a mixture of playground sand and saltine crackers.
Still, there were a few annoying reminders that I was driving a Kia.
For instance, I sometimes like to drive with my elbow up by the driver's side window. That's normally not a problem, but it it was absolute torture in the Amanti because the little ledge by the window is tapered to a sharp point. Lexus would have fired their interior design team over something like that.
And there are plenty of other little things to gripe about. The steering wheel feels too thin for such a big car. The gauges are too small and cheap looking, like they came out of the little Rio economy car. When you start the car, the air conditioner takes way too long to start blowing, so you'd swear you were sitting on the surface of Venus.
A lot of these complaints can be forgiven, though, when you look at the Amanti's price. It starts at $25,495, which is more like a well-equipped Camry than a luxury car.
For that price, you get a car that, in many ways, drives like an $80,000 machine. It looks nice, drives superbly and can keep you comfortable even after hours on the highway.
But for many people, that's still not enough to overcome its greatest weakness – the Kia badge.
(Derek Price is a newspaper editor and freelance writer living in Texas.)
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