Kia is a full line automaker. A full line automaker that names every single one of their cars with real, tangible names. But then they showed off the Kia K900, a premium sedan without a real name. What's the deal?
We were curious as to the exact reasoning why Kia felt they had to enter the alphabet soup that is luxury car naming, especially when companies like Porsche and sister company Hyundai have given their premium sedans lovely, tangible names.
So why K900, a name that sounds a lot like a robot dog?
Kia's North American head of marketing and communications Michael Sprague told us that they felt it needed that name to succeed. He told us to "look at the BMW 5-Series, Mercedes E-Class, etc" and how they are named. That's what most buyers in the premium market expect, and it's proof that manufacturers have killed names for executive sedans, instead training us to want things with letters and numbers, not names like Eldorado, DeVille, Legend, Vigor, Bavaria, Zephyr, Town Car, and Continental.
Instead, our monkey brains need to have letters like CTS or numbers like 535i or the car just doesn't fit into that segment.
When we asked Sprague what the car was called in other markets, he said it uses K9, K900, or Quoris. It's a shame they aren't using the last one, because Quoris just rolls off the tongue. And that is not sarcasm.