Two dealerships in the Seattle area, Performance Kia in Everett and Lee Johnson's Kia in Kirkland. I went to both today (09/24/17). They both have the same vehicle, 4 cyl with AWD and GT package, both in Deep Chroma Blue. Both are powered and fueled, you can even turn on the engine (for a brief period of time since both are indoors), just can't drive as the cars are Korean spec and thus not road legal. I want to share some thing I observed and/or learned from the salesman, though please take these with a grain of salt as everything is not finalized.
Exterior:
- The
badges on the car are quite in-consistent. Kia
badge on the nose, Stinger
badge (E
badge) on the steering wheel, and plain Stinger scripture
badge on the rear. The salesman is not quite sure what the final US-spec car will have.
- The front bumper side vent and body side vent are both functional to cool the front wheels and breaks. The hood vent and rear side vent are for aesthetic purpose only and are not functional.
- There's tons of spare room in the engine bay with the 4 cylinder.
- There isn't a spare tire underneath the trunk floor mat. It's available as a add-on.
- The Deep Chroma Blue that the car is in is not available for the US.
- The 6 colors (all metallic) available for the US are:
- Pearl White ($300-$500 extra)
- Silky Silver
- Aurora Black ($300-$500 extra)
- Ceramic Silver
- Hi Chroma Red
- Micro Blue
See the colors mentioned by referring to the color charted posted by STINGER here:
Color possibilities
Interior:
- Lots of piano black trims everywhere. There may be an option to switch to a different trim material (wood, metal, etc), not sure on that.
- Heated and ventilated front seats, heated rear seats and heated steering wheel. The ventilation works quite well, though it was a sunny low 70s day, not sure if it will hold up on a 90s summer day. The heated steering wheel heats up the bottom 2/3 of the wheel, the top portion does not seems to be heated.
- Interior lighting will be LED based on upper trims. Illuminated foot-well for the front passengers.
- The passenger seats have some adjustment controls on the left side that can be accessed by the rear passengers. It moves the seats front and back and also adjust the
seat back angle. Thought I'd bring it up since I never seen it on another vehicle before.
- Rear visibility is pretty bad. The C pillars are thick and the rear window is quite short.
- All 5 interir colors are availble: Black, Brown, Beige, Grey and Red, though I think some are exterior color specific.
- Cup holder with cover. The cup holes are assymetrical, with front one being larger. The front fits a 20oz double wall vacuum thermos with slack, and the back one fits a venti Starbucks cup snuggly.
Tech:
- There a compartment in front of the shifter with Qi wireless charger inside it. Works with my S8+, but didn't seem to be fast wireless charging. The recepticle for the wireless charges fits my S8+ with a slim case perfectly, and a Note 8 should fit fine too. iPhone 8 and X will also fit, but not sure about the 8 plus as that is quite wide.
- HUD works really well. It projects a foot or two in front of the nose of the vehicle, and you can change height, sizes, rotation and color of the text too. Also gives turn by turn and blind spot monitoring information, though I wasn't able to try those out.
-
Android Auto works well, voice recognition is fast and responsive.
- The 8" infotainment screen is touch enabled, and there's no lag when swiping through menus. The buttons on the steering wheel doesn't seem to correspond to it though, so I think it's mainly a touch based system.
- The 8" infotainment screen and the 7" screen in the instrument cluster are dimmed together. There's a button below the driver side air vent that adjust the brightness in 20 levels.
- SD card based navigation. Though I couldn't try it out as the SD card is missing.
- Putting the gear in reverse engage the rear view camera and 360 degrees top view camera together. Dynamic turning guides for the rear view camera with proximity sensors.
Pricing and Availabilirty:
- Pricing is not yet finalized. Though I was told high 30k to 52k.
- Trim and packages are not finalized either.
- For the first round, the cars will not be sold under MSRP/invoice price. This policy is coming from the top and applies to every dealership. If a dealership sells a car under MSRP, they will not be allocated any Stingers from the next shipment. This policy may change however in the future (say 6 months after the Stinger has been on sale).
- One of the dealership (Lee Johnson's Mazda) is accepting pre-orders for December.
- The dealership will be allocated 5 cars in December. The next batch will be in January. If all 5 cars are not already taken by pre-orders, the remaining will be used for test drives. So the soonest test drives will be in December.
- Time for build to order cars to come in is 2 weeks (starting in December/January I'm assuming).
- All Stingers will be shipped from Korea.
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