Is This A Restomod Kia Pride?

Kia is gearing up to celebrate its 80th birthday, and it looks like its present to itself is a restomod of the first car it sold in the UK

Mike Bartholomew

04 Oct 2024

Did you know Kia turned 80 this year? Founded in Seoul in 1944, it got its start building steel tubing and bits of bicycle. By 1957, it was making motorbikes, trucks arrived in 1962, and by 1974, it was making its first car – the Brisa, a licence-built Mazda Familia. Now, the company’s teasing a one-off ‘restomod’ it’s produced to celebrate this milestone, and it looks like it’s based on the first car it sold in Britain: the Kia Pride.

As is customary with basically any car reveal these days, we’ve only been supplied with the shadowy teaser image you see above, but that cover seems to pretty clearly hide the boxy silhouette of the little hatch. The glimpse of a very ’90s-style headlight matches up, too.

If you’re not familiar, the Pride was the car that introduced the British public at large to Kia. It was actually a licence-built version of the original Ford Festiva, a little econo-box designed for markets such as the US that didn’t get the Fiesta. Following? Good.

Entering production in 1987, it spearheaded Kia’s launch in the UK in 1991, when buyers could choose between a pair of four-cylinder petrol engines – a 1.1-litre with 51bhp, or a 1.3-litre with a mighty 60bhp. A fuel-injected version of the 1.3 arrived in 1994, bringing power to the heady heights of 63bhp, and it was sold right up until the end of Pride production (Prideuction?) in 2000.

It’s a far cry from some of the cars Kia sells today, like the 577bhp electric EV6 GT, but, true to its roots, Kia is one of the only companies keeping the faith in small, simple petrol city cars, with a refreshed Picanto launching just this year.

As for this ‘restomod’, we’ll have to wait until Bicester Heritage’s Scramble event on 6 October for a proper look and to get all the deets. Naturally, we’re hoping it’s got some ludicrous turbo four-wheel drive underpinnings, but more realistically, we’d imagine there are some electric motors involved here. Either way, we hope it retains the whitewall tyres that the Pride was available with for… some reason.