Media post: A quick look at the Kia Optima

Kia Optima

The 2017 Kia Optima is waiting for you. Its well-appointed interior will thrill you with its luxurious look and feel. This sedan has something for everybody and once you take a test drive at Monroeville Kia you will see what we mean. Get behind the wheel and then reach over to the infotainment touchscreen interface. See, isn’t that nice? It’s so close and so easy to use. The 8-inch infotainment touchscreen interface is large enough to see what you need at a glance. That’s why they call it user-friendly – because it is. It comes with a smartphone interface and a navigation system to let you where you’re going and how to get there.

Now start it up. Wow, hardly any vibration and the cabin remains as quiet as before the 2.0-Liter turbocharged engine turned over. The interior was designed to keep the fun in and the noise outside and the designers succeeded very nicely – once again. Now you can sit back and look around and one of the first things you may notice is that there is ample headroom. The next thing will be the legroom and then the amount of space there is for shoulders and viewing out the windows. For a mid-size car, the Optima offers a lot of luxuries.

Kia is a South Korean company that started making bicycle parts in 1944. It branched out to making motorcycles in 1957, trucks in 1962 and then began manufacturing cars in 1974. Trying to catch up with carmakers who had been building cars 70 years before Kia jumped into the industry was tough but obviously not impossible. Kia has caught up with them and is now the second largest car manufacturer in South Korea, right behind Hyundai.

Kia and Hyundai are related in a sense: each one owns part of the other’s company. Kia owns over $8 billion worth of stock in companies owned by Hyundai and Hyundai owns a little more than a third of Kia’s stock. Kia has over 700 dealers in the United States and operates a manufacturing plant, where the Optima is built, in the state of Georgia. The Optima is one of Kia’s best sellers in this country and after sitting in it, starting it and taking it for a test drive, we understand why the Kia Optima is so popular.