Kia's new Pro_cee'd GT a soul-stirrer - Drivesouth
Take a compact European-designed and built three-door coupe, equip it with a peppy turbo-petrol engine and snappy six-speed manual transmission, and there are good grounds for expecting that a rewarding motoring experience is close at hand. Enter the new Pro_cee'd GT, designed in Germany, build in Slovakia, and proudly carrying the emblem of ambitious Korean car maker Kia. That was the second-generation Kia Koup, a four-door Cerato hatch derivative that - in its initial 2010 iteration - was the first Kia to show mainstream sporting style. Kia upped the Koup's game this year by introducing a 1. 6-turbo engine under the bonnet, but while that gave the Koup a welcome boost in straight-line urge, in most other dynamic respects it remained constrained by its mainstream Korean family-car... Not so the Pro_cee'd GT, which includes in its European design brief a sophisticated multilink rear suspension (the Koup made do with a more basic torsion beam system), snug sports seats and a grippy set of low-profile Michelin tyres. The car those tyres connect to the road is also available in five-door and automatic guise in Europe, but with the similar-sized Koup covering those bases here, the only variant we see is the three-door, six-speed manual. Source: www.drivesouth.co.nz
