CarBrandLogos archive · Kia · 1987

KiaPride

Put a carmaker back in the car business, then outlived the decade by thirty years.

Photo: Stahlkocher · CC BY-SA 3.0

The story

A defining chapter in Kia history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Kia Pride, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Kia had been making cars since the 1970s, but in 1981 the South Korean government's industrial rationalisation programme forced the company out of passenger vehicles altogether and confined it to commercial trucks and vans. The Pride, launched in 1987, was its return.

kia pride 1 · Chu · CC BY-SA 3.0

Design and engineering

The car itself came from Mazda. Kia built the Mazda 121 supermini under licence at its own plant, and the same vehicle was sold in North America as the Ford Festiva through the Ford-Mazda-Kia arrangement of the period. It was small, front-wheel-drive, cheap to run and unpretentious, which was exactly what the Korean market wanted at the point when private car ownership was becoming widespread there.

kia pride 0001 · Chu · CC BY-SA 3.0

In production

Its longest life came elsewhere. Iran's SAIPA licensed the design and built it as the Saipa Pride from the early 1990s, producing it in enormous numbers for decades after Kia itself had moved on. For a generation of Iranian drivers the Pride was simply what a car was. Few designs of its size and modesty have been built for so long or in so many places.

Saipa 111 · Drsaeed90 · CC BY-SA 3.0

Technical specification