A New Kia Stinger Is On The Table, But It’s For Buyers Who Grew Up On Controllers, Not V6s

The Stinger never sold in the numbers Kia had hoped for, but it built something more valuable than volume: a small, loyal audience that still wants the brand to try again. The company is keen to make another sports sedan in the vein of the Stinger, only this one will run on electrons and could trace its bones to the recent Vision Meta Turismo concept.

The EV6 GT was supposed to fill the void. It hasn’t. The crossover stance and electric powertrain never landed with the enthusiast crowd the Stinger had cultivated, and the price walked well past where the Stinger ever lived. Design boss Karim Habib is betting that performance EVs will eventually get cheap enough to make the Meta Turismo a production reality and a real Stinger replacement.

Read: Kia’s New Concept Sparks Questions About A Stinger GT Return

“We have a small history of doing cars like the Stinger, and that’s something we don’t want to give up on,” Habib told Autocar. “The Meta Turismo is our idea of a sports sedan for the gamer generation. A few years ago, we started thinking about what could we do beyond SUVs? We do produce and sell a lot of SUVs, which is good, but we also believe that there’s more than that.”

Kia revealed the striking concept late last year as the latest evolution of its Opposites United design language. Like every recent Kia show car, it’s dramatic and has a design that the company says is supposed to be emotionally engaging. But it’s not yet ready for prime time.

EV Tech Needs To Develop

“At this point, it is more strategic,” Karim said when asked by Autocar why Kia doesn’t start building it today. “It’s a pure EV, and the price of doing a high-performance EV is what is slowing us down. Hopefully, the upward movement of EVs keeps going. I think there will be more openness to this [type of] car. At least that’s what we’re betting on.”

Kia built the Stinger for just five and a half years before killing it off in 2023. It launched with a 2.0-liter turbo four and a 3.3-liter twin-turbo V6, picked up a 2.5-liter four at the facelift, and was briefly offered with a 2.2-liter turbo-diesel in some markets. While enthusiasts like ourselves would like Kia to capture some of the ICE magic in a successor, this doesn’t appear likely.

“We’re car people,” Kia head of interior design Jochen Paesen said. “We grew up on the side of a race track hearing V8s, but those are not the things that the younger generation care as much about. It actually doesn’t trigger them. It triggered us, but we’re living in a different age, so understanding what triggers the younger generation and gets them emotionally tied in and emotionally interested, that’s important.”