Key considerations
• Available for £24,000• 3.3-litre V6 biturbo petrol, rear-wheel drive• A good all-round performance car…• …if you don’t mind it being a saloon• Nothing seems to go wrong• Even the older has three years of warranty left
The Kia Stinger sedan was launched in Detroit at the beginning of 2017. This show is traditionally dominated by American manufacturers, but Kia really caught my attention with its first grand tourer, its first rear-wheel drive car and , in the top-of-the-range version: its most powerful and most accelerating production car ever.
Kia had taken an effort of will to follow this path. As a major producer of cheaper cars, they were understandably nervous about being able to sell enough Stingers to make it a success. Design guru Peter Schreyer had worked on the project with Kia design chief Gregory Guillame, who had grown up in 1970s France when moneyed people informed their families about the place in grand touring cars . At the Stinger launch, Guillame said the car had nothing to do with being the first to arrive. It was all about the journey.
He was certainly right about the speed of arrival. The Stinger was based on its Kia GT Concept that had first seen the light of day six years earlier in Frankfurt, then spent the better part of another year after Detroit before the keys (ok, it be keyless, but you know what we mean). ) began to reach the hands of sweaty British journalists.
Fortunately for Kia, it then took no time to create a head of steam not only among magazine road testers, but also among potential buyers. Many of those buyers who thought they were in the market for a BMW 5 Series or Audi A6 were sorely tempted by the fastback looks of the Coke-bottle, long-coat Stinger.
The performance orientation of the three-car range was also attractive, with specs for two of the three models suggesting you could be the first to get there, if that sort of thing mattered to you. Alongside the 200bhp 2.2 diesel was a 245bhp 2.0 petrol with a 0-62 time of under six seconds, but the car we’ll be focusing on here is the 3.3-litre petrol V6 bi -turbo Not just because it had more power (370bhp) and a 0-62 time of under five seconds, but also because if you’re going to look for something like this on the second-hand market, you should probably be doing pretty well, mostly. with depreciation reducing the second-hand entry price of the 3.3 to a level not much higher than its younger siblings.
The Stinger was very much about showroom impact. Once the punter had laid eyes on her sultry appearance, inside and out, a test drive was the natural next step. This only brought them more into the grid as the Kia did very well. It had a well-designed interior, a sporty driving position that made you forget it was a family car, and equipment packages, not just the toys you’d expect from a top-of-the-line car, but also the safety stuff. Even the entry-level GT-Line cars had automatic emergency braking, lane keeping and high beam assist, plus a driver attention system and speed limit information for go with its full leather interior (including dashboard, wheel, gearshift and armrests) and an Alcantara system. header.
In addition, you had an eight-inch infotainment screen, a seven-inch TFT info screen between the main analogue instruments, head-up display, eight-way power seats (heated in the front with power cushion extenders and electric lumbar adjustment), digital radio with nine speakers and a subwoofer, and a heated steering wheel. In 2018, this base GT-Line model set you back £5 from £32,000 in 2.0 petrol form, or just under £33,900 as a diesel, quite decent value for an individual type of car.
The mid-range GT-Line S added blind-spot detection and rear cross-traffic alert, as well as a wireless phone charger, ventilated front and heated outer rear seats, a 360-degree view camera, and a 15-speaker Harman Kardon surround sound stereo. GT-Line S prices were £35,495 (2.0 petrol) and £37,395 (2.2 diesel).
The top-spec GT S came with Nappa leather, electronic adaptive dampers, Brembo brakes and 19-inch wheels. From the start of Stinger sales in early 2018, this spec could only be ordered with the 3.3 engine, starting at £40,495.
An updated Stinger arrived for the European market in September 2020. This included styling tweaks inside and out, with LED front, rear and cornering lights (with the indicators arranged in a checkered flag pattern), a new wheel design, a 10-split infotainment screen, 25 inches larger and a more “executive” cabin atmosphere through the use of new materials, including aluminum for the center console. A Saturn Black suede pack joined the interior spec options, and you can start your Stinger remotely with a new smart key.
By early 2021, the 2.2 diesel and 2.0 petrol had been quietly withdrawn from the range, leaving only the 3.3 which in the 2020 update received a small 3bhp boost thanks to the addition of an exhaust variable A new 300bhp 2.5 four-cylinder ‘Smartstream’ engine was launched in the US market, but did not make it to the UK.
So why were kitchen models dropped? Poor sales. Most Stinger buyers opted for the big boy, presumably as a result of “Mustang syndrome,” which makes it embarrassing to admit that your butch car actually has a little four-pot under the hood. That and the usual suspect of an upcoming shift to EVs, with seven Kia EVs slated for release before 2027.
Back in July 2021, there were strong indications that Kia was going to wrap the Stinger entirely by mid-2022 (or now, if you’re reading this fresh off the virtual press) and its most likely replacement would be the Kia EV6 GT. Shortly thereafter, however, we heard that the Stinger wouldn’t be stopping until later this year (2022). This was good news for Australian police forces who had lost access to locally built Ford Falcons and Holden Commodores, and for you if you’ve been thinking about getting into a new Stinger sometime this year .
However, this is a used buyers guide. If you share the opinion of those who consider the Stinger to be a brilliant car, and many well-informed observers do, with Autocar singling it out for its ‘Game Changer’ award, here’s where you can save yourself a bit of order sum As noted above, a new 3.3 would set you back over £40,000 in 2018, and today, in mid-2022, a new one will be over £45,000, but you can pick up a ‘pre-priced’ one for as little as £24,000. Not bad for a flagship car type with a seven-year/100,000-mile warranty (ten years for the powertrain), meaning even the oldest 2018 Stinger will still have at least three years of coverage left , assuming he hasn’t. 500 miles a week for the rest of his life, of course.
Just to reassure you, we haven’t seen any Stingers for sale with more than 60,000 miles. On average UK cars seem to be between 15 and 25,000 miles. Are you still interested? Is it worth the money, or are there some stings in the tail? Let’s put on our beekeeping gear and dive into a hive of activity as we try to figure out if this car is actually a honey. Okay, enough of the bee references, let’s get to it.
SPECIFICATION | KIA STINGER GT S 3.3 (from 2018)
Engine: 3,342 cc V6 24v twin turbo Transmission: 8-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive Power (hp): 370 @ 6,000 rpm Torque (lb ft): 376 @ 1,300-4,500 rpm 0-60 mph (seconds): Speed (4 mph) 168 Weight (kg): 1,890 MPG (official combined): 28.5 CO2 (g/km): 225 Wheels (inch): 8 x 19 (f), 9 x 19 (r) Tires: 225/40 (f), 255/35 (r) On sale: 2018 – 2021 (revised 2021) Price new (2018): £40,495 Price now: from £24,000
Note for reference: Car weight and power figures are difficult to determine with absolute certainty. For consistency, we use the same source for all our guides. We expect the data we use to be right more often than wrong. Our advice is to treat it as relative rather than definitive.
ENGINE AND GEARBOX
The direct injection 3.3 V6 didn’t deliver its 370bhp peak until 6,000rpm, quite high for a relatively large displacement engine. Peak torque kicked in at a more useful 1,300 rpm, but some wondered why a twin-turbocharged 3.3 only made 376 lb-ft. However, they were just numbers. On the road, the thought “that’s not fast enough” rarely crossed a Stinger owner’s mind.
The midrange thrust in the 3.3 was impressive and very accessible. An active sound system increased engine noise to a degree that was determined by which mode you had the drive mode selector in. Onlookers could gaze in awe at the 3.3’s four-pipe exhaust, although even the petrol 2.0 had it.
This was a direct injection engine with a single injector unlike more modern GDI (Gas Direct Injection) engines which combine direct and port injection, so the possibility of carbon buildup on intake valves. It’s probably a good idea to run fuel injector and/or intake manifold cleaners through the engine every 6,000 miles or six months. Placing a can should not void your warranty. There were no timing belts to replace as the cams were chain driven.
For a nice change, the 8-speed gearbox was Kia’s own rather than something with ZF emblazoned on it. It was a very suitable partner for the engine and made the Stinger very easy to drive. It included something called a Centrifugal Pendulum Damper, which sounds like a name for a 1970s prog rock band, but was actually a device to reduce torsional transmission vibrations. The drive mode selector provided five shift/acceleration programs and there was a limited slip differential on all models, even the diesel.
Service intervals ran on an expensive-sounding six-month/6,000-mile schedule. In fact all the other services were just a 30 minute oil change so the ‘real’ services were every 12 months like…