2018 Kia Cerato vs 2017

What's the difference?

As SUV sales continue to rise, Kia is taking a slightly different tack. Despite steady declines in sales numbers for small cars, the company looks not at percentages, but at figures… and the smaller end of the new car segment still makes up more than 350,000 sales a year. 

Not a bad space to play in, especially if other players are diving out…

It’s here that Kia will drop its almost all-new third generation Cerato, which will go up against big-selling rivals like the Toyota Corolla and Mazda3. It’s just a sedan at this stage, with the hatch expected later in 2018.

It is no real secret that the motoring world is guilty of criminal misuse of the English language ("polarising" design, for example, actually means that everyone who has ever seen it hates it, with the possible exception of the person who designed the car) but no single term is so outrageously abused as the word “sport”. 

You can have everything from a humongous Mazda CX-9 to a tiny Toyota Corolla in the alluring-sounding Sport guise, only to find yourself behind the wheel of a car as performance-ready as Clive Palmer wheezing away on a treadmill.

And we can safely add the Kia Cerato Sport sedan to that ever-growing list. While Kia’s fetching small sedan (which might be one of Australia’s best-value new cars) is a lot of very good things, sporty simply ain’t one of them.

Luckily, then, it’s got a few other aces up its sleeve.