No unpleasant odors in this cool limousine with rear-wheel drive.
Life in the car world used to be so much more fun, actually. Nowadays everything has to be premium. Or a crossover. Or electric. If you’re unlucky, you’ll be in an electric premium crossover. Now there isn’t much wrong with it. It’s like hazelnut ice cream: pretty good. But a little variety doesn’t hurt. That used to be the case. Instead of the tired European competition, you could also opt for Asian sloops. Not that they were always better than the Europeans, but they were more interesting. For example, a Nissan Maxima QX always had a V6 and you could even get the Xedos 9 with a supercharger! Oh, and there was no such thing as a bare Kia Opirus.
This cool limousine that you see in the images is distantly the successor to the Opirus. That was still a hopeless E-Class/S-Type copy, which still had to cost 80,000 guilders. But then you got all the options and a very big 3.5 V6. This Kia K9 is a bit of the same thing: a lot for relatively little.
You may already know the K9. The second generation of this cool limousine came on the market in 2018 and received a facelift in 2021, which colleague @machielvdd thought looked like an Audi (just like the rest of the internet, by the way). Now it’s time for another facelift.
Another facelift for this cool limousine
Indeed, just like yesterday’s Suzuki Vitara, the car is getting a second update. Once again the grille is being addressed by Kia. The Audi-esque dimensions remain. Just like the Audi A8, the front consists almost entirely of a grille. The horizontal bars have been replaced by V-shaped frills. It doesn’t get any quieter, with that massive grille. But hey, you can show off a bit with such a cool limousine, right?
As befits a top limo, the Kia K9 has a very special unique feature. There is a facility called ‘After Blow’. And before all Amsterdam taxi drivers rush to the Kia website to order a big K9, no, After Blow is not that. After Blow is a feature that blows the car’s air ducts dry with warm air. This way no condensation remains.
This is how Active Blow works
So suppose you have just driven for an hour with your big Kia K9. Truly a cool limousine, because it is COLD while the sparrows are falling from the roof outside. When you get out of the car, After Blow comes into effect half an hour later to blow the ducts clean for four and ten minutes. Naturally, there is a sensor to prevent the system from coming into operation when the battery is almost empty. It will also not work if it is cold outside or if the air conditioning has not been used for a while.
Of course, the Kia K9 is packed with equipment. There are even more USB-C ports and a massage function for the front seats. Special: a fire extinguisher is standard on this cool limousine.
Finally, the technology of the Kia K9. You can order the enormous Korean sloop with a naturally aspirated 3.8 liter V6, or a 3.3 V6 with turbo. You can then choose whether you want rear-wheel or four-wheel drive.
The prices are very interesting: approximately 41 grand for the entry-level to 60 grand for the top version. For those prices, the car could also be interesting in the Netherlands. But yes, as we have found with the Kia Stinger, so much tax is charged on it that it is unsellable.
Read more? These are 13 very cool and unknown limousines!
Comments
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jaapiyo say
Cool thing. But indeed, in our tax climate this will be more than 100K. In that respect, we do indeed live in a threatening climate.
