Kia Optima Wagon will not be produced

The Sportspace concept from Kia will not evolve into a station wagon variant of the new Optima which was presented last week in NY.

Kia Motors U.S. product planning vice president tells that they consider it to be a beautiful vehicle. He says it is a big deal on the continent since people in Europe love estates.

The automaker made a hint at the possible estate variant of the Optima last March. They showed off the Sportspace concept in Switzerland then.

They realized that an Optima wagon customer is on the top of their Sorento buyer. The producer stated that the Optima is their best-selling product in America. Kia reported 159,020 sales there last year in comparison with the Sorento which was the producer’s third best-selling vehicle in 2014 (102,520 cars). Together they make 45% of the company’s sales a year ago.

A wagon variant of the Optima may serve to elevate the manufacturer’s profile in European market. Though, that will not be sufficient to justify the business case.

The product planning vice president tells that the company looked at the volume and at the number of customers that would chose the model and its possible price.

Though, bringing the gap between the show concept and the series production will cost too much. The automaker builds Optimas for this market and for the rest of the world at its West point, Ga. factory. Hendricks considers that it would be a completely other set of tooling to bring all that in.

Therefore, the chance of an Optima station wagon remains in a form of a concept for now.