thanks @ll for the welcome
After one full week of driving my Stinger, I'm still loving this car. It was a great decision and a fantastic upgrade.
Welcome to our Stinger forum, Congrats on your Stinger in Panthera Metal, a nice colour, please share some photos of your new Stinger, because we always look forward to seeing a new members Stinger here.
thanks, and photos will follow, promised
Yeah, don't let anybody bother you on the road. If you can avoid street racing, avoid it. There are too many people driving while sending text messages, reading email, or on Facebook...
Is it just me or is it getting even worse over time?
Congrats commercialist on your new ride!
Have a ? for you (if you don't mind).
One thing I have noted is that the Stinger does particularly well in Germany (and other countries which speak German or a similar language such as Switzerland) in comparison to its Asian competition from Lexus and Infiniti.
How would you say that the Stinger is viewed by the auto-enthusiast and the general populace in comparison to the IS and Q50?
And how onerous are the CO2 and/or displacement taxes in Germany (in EU countries w/ really high taxes, the TTV6 gets really expensive) and do you think a hybrid variant (something Kia is purportedly working on) of the Stinger will help increase sales (as diesels are falling out of favor across the EU).
Hi YEH, thanks for the welcome. Well, "particularly well" in Germany is a bit exaggerated, probably, according to some statistic numbers: starting in August, in 2017 a total of 449 Kia Stinger (no further details on the model/ engine) have been registered in Germany.
Most of them Kia owned cars for presentations, presumably.
In 2018, data as of end of June, an additional 540 have been registered. Thats roughly 1,000 brand new Kia Stingers compared to a total of 2,937,332 (1,098,301 in 2017 and 1,839,031 in 2018 during the same time period) brand new cars registered. Crazy numbers, eh? Btw, there was a total of 64,068 brand new Kia cars registered in 2017 overall.
Because it is rare, the Kia Stinger is a head-turner, most people can't believe it's a Kia, since it easily resembles other more luxury cars and, for the V6, performs not necessarily worse in everyday situations. Kia themselves have made quite some progress here in Germany, but more in the small to medium sized cars section, and with the famous SUVs (yes, Germans love their SUV, because... of reasons! 521,660 SUVs registered, out of 3,441,262 in total 2017). You see a lot of Picantos, Ceeds and Sportages here.
Lexus and Infinity are indeed much scarcer on german roads, both manufacturers are among "others" in the publicly available statistics.
Tax is based on CO2 emission and engine size. The emission is quite good for the Stinger, Kia is aiming at reaching "Euro-6d-TEMP", the currently highest and hardest to get certification, starting in fall (this emission class is mandatory in Germany for newly registered cars starting in September 2019). Since the V6 is quite large, tax is a bit higher (and for me slightly more expensive than my Mazda 6 diesel I had before). We're talking about roughly 420 USD per year.
Hybrid cars... I would say it's difficult, here in Germany, but they are on the rise. Nevertheless, as of now it's just a fraction in comparison to the overall cars existing. Out of 46.5 Million cars registered in Germany in total, as of January 1st, 2018, only 236,710 were hybrid cars. I would see this more like a prestige thing - even though it will take some time to raise the amount of hybrid cars to a serious level, every manufacturer who wants to establish themselves in Germany needs to provide hybrid versions of their cars. From my personal view and referring to the Stinger, a hybrid version would need to be more on the sporty side for this car. Adding a hybrid version to make a Stinger a "green car" at the cost of its sportive character would probably not be successful. But times are changing, who knows what the market looks like in a year or two.
I'll leave you with the numbers. Sorry for the long post, but after starting to research a little but I couldn't really stop
- com.
