On Sunday 6 October 2024, a ground-breaking, game-changing new electrified car was unveiled to the world. No, not the McLaren W1. We’re of course talking about the Kia Pride EV, a one-off ‘restomod’ that Kia has created as an 80th birthday for itself.
Yep, 2024 marks eight decades since the company that’s now Kia was established in Seoul as a manufacturer of steel tubing and bicycle parts. To celebrate, Kia UK has turned back to the model that introduced the South Korean brand to the British market: the Pride.
Produced from 1987, the Pride was a rebadged, Korean-built version of the Ford Festiva, a little econobox that was never sold in Europe. The Pride went on sale in the UK in 1991 with a choice of 1.1-litre, 51bhp or 1.3-litre, 60bhp petrol four-pots. A fuel-injected version of the 1.3 arrived in 1994, taking things to the heady heights of 63bhp.
That’s all been thrown out with the Pride EV, and replaced with a fully electric drivetrain with the help of British EV conversion specialist Electrogenic. The electric motor it’s fitted makes up to 107bhp and 173lb ft of toque, which will now take the Pride to 62mph in an estimated 8.0 seconds – quite the drop from the 11.8 seconds the original managed even in its spriteliest form.
Kia Pride EV – interior
That’s doable with the Pride EV in ‘sport’ mode – yes, it has a sport mode. The default ‘eco’ setting drops power down to 60bhp, while ‘auto’ mode sets the motor to an 80bhp middle ground.
Unusually for an EV, Kia and Electrogenic have retained the Pride’s five-speed manual gearbox, although auto mode – as the name suggests – allows it to be driven as an automatic too, and cranks up the regenerative braking a little.
Kia Pride EV – rear
Visually, things have been kept true to the Pride’s late ’80s roots. More powerful lighting has supplanted the originals, and the car’s been resprayed in White Pearl, a colour found across Kia’s modern range of EVs. Other than that, though, the exterior is as it was in the early ’90s – 12-inch steel wheels and all. The interior has been given a similarly subtle makeover, with flashes of lime green to link it to the 577bhp EV6 GT – about the only thing it has in common with that car.
The whole conversion only adds 20kg to the Pride’s original 850kg kerb weight, and it’ll apparently manage around 120 miles on a charge. Not that that’s particularly relevant, because you can’t buy this car. The question is, if you could, would you?
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