Would suit:
People who don't really believe they deserve a Golf.
Price:
From £10,995 (about R153 000).
Performance:
171km/h, 0-100km/h 13.8sec (as tested).
Combined fuel consumption:
4.7 litres/100km.
With cars, as with life in general, the school playground can provide us with a useful psycho-social template. The car world has, for instance, its bullies (Hummer), bulimics (Lotus) and brainiacs (Audi).
There is the class swot (Lexus), the snob (Mercedes), the dunce (Peugeot), the slut (Alfa), the head boy (Aston Martin), the fashion victim (Mini) and the closet homosexual (Hummer again).
I was a rare fashion victim/dunce hybrid, if you must know.
And then there is the new Kia Cee'd. The Cee'd is the child who tries too hard to fit in, who, for fear of being singled out, remains on high reactive alert to what everyone else is wearing, listening to, watching on TV and saying, mimicking their every move (the company started out by making a re-badged Mazda 121, for heaven's sake).
In its meticulous efforts to conform - in this case, to being a member of the medium-sized family hatchback class - the child/ car sacrifices whatever individuality or personality it might have had to the tyranny of mediocrity.
Unless they are truly adept at doing this (and so wind up as an MP) the child will still come a cropper because, of course, his peers will eventually pinpoint this very desperation to conform as his particular weakness and stick his head in the toilet regardless.
This is where my already over-stretched motoring/schoolyard analogy pretty much falls to pieces because, of course, the Kia won't be bullied - cars don't get bullied, that would be silly - and in fact, with target sales of only 10 000 a year in the UK, it will, and deserves to, succeed.
Remove the badges and the Cee'd (pronounced "seed" and designed in Germany) could almost be a Toyota, and praise doesn't come higher than that in this sector.
It is well proportioned and fashionably chiselled - better looking, in fact, than Toyota's new arrival in the market, its Corolla replacement, the Auris (boy, are they running low on new car names these days).
The panel gaps are a little wayward but I expect the Slovakian factory where they build the Cee'd will remedy that as production progresses. Inside, it is bland to the point of insolence, but better quality than some other Asian budget makes. The surfaces are padded; the grab handles damped; the seats are fine.
All is adequate on the performance front from the 1.6-litre diesel I tried. It is a nice car to drive; there's nothing noticeably offensive about it.
Showroom sweetener
The only hint of a whisper of non-conformity from the Cee'd is that Kia has stuck the indicator on the right-hand stalk, which is actually a far better ergonomic solution than having it on the left as in most cars, because you can change gear and indicate at the same time.
But there is one area where the Cee'd towers over the opposition: a showroom sweetener that is causing paroxysms of terror among the rest of Europe's manufacturers.
Every Cee'd sold in Europe comes with an unprecedented seven-year or 150 000km warranty - plus a 10-year anti-rust perforation warranty; Kia SA won't say whether it will come to South Africa with an extended warranty - particularly as the SA launch date has been revised from April to September/October 2007.
If the progress of Honda and Toyota is anything to go by, Kia will be looking to muscle in on premium European territory within the next decade.
One thing is certain, however: to do that it will have to do more than just skulk around the staffroom door hoping no one will laugh at its haircut or steal its dinner money. - The Independent, London