Kia Is Ready To Build An Electric Successor To The Stinger. One Thing Is Holding It Back.

• Kia says that it would like to build a spiritual successor to the Stinger.
• The biggest thing holding it back? The cost of an electric performance sedan.
• Never say never, though. Kia’s design boss isn’t ruling anything out if EVs continue to become more popular.

There was a time not too long ago when the Kia was doing what almost no other automaker dared to. The growing South Korean automaker built a rear-wheel-drive enthusiast car with a twin-turbocharged V-6 after nearly every other mainstream brand had abandoned the sports sedan segment. It had real power and proportions that made even the Germans a bit nervous. But it died after just one generation, going out of production in 2023.

Now, Kia wants to do it again. And just like last time, the brand is priding itself on going out on a limb to build something driven by emotion instead of logic. The successor to the Stinger is closer than ever.

Photo by: Kia

In a recent interview with Autocar, Kia’s design boss Karim Habib said that the spiritual successor to the Stinger is still very much on the menu. But this time, Kia wants it to be electric.

The funniest part may be Kia describing the idea as a “sports sedan for the gamer generation,” which makes the whole idea feel more like a collab with Mountain Dew or Monster Energy. But rest assured, that underneath of that marketing language is something genuinely interesting that should restore your faith: Kia really does seem obsessed with becoming a company that builds cars people have an emotional connection to.

Enter the Meta Turismo, a concept Kia showed off last year. Designed to represent the future of Kia’s high-performance, stylish sedans, the Turismo could also be the inspiration of the next-gen Stinger.

“We have a small history of doing cars like the Stinger and that’s something we don’t want to give up on,” said Habib in an interview with 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.”

That’s important because Kia is showing that it understands something that a lot of brands magically forgot during the great crossover flood of the 2010s. People actually like cars that offer a special experience. Not every car has to be practical or adventure-oriented. Some folks just want to drive something that makes the commute to work feel engaging.

You can see it happening across the Hyundai-Kia empire. Hyundai’s N division has become startlingly good at building enthusiast cars. Even Porsche executives have all but admitted that Hyundai has set the bar for fun EVs. Couple that with wild concepts like the Hyundai N-Vision 74 and you can quickly see that practicality isn’t always the most important notion when building a car.

So then why hasn’t Kia just built the next-gen Stinger already?

The real answer always comes down to dollars and cents. Habib says that the cost of building a performance battery-electric car is the main drag, though that doesn’t mean it’ll never happen.

“At this point, it is more strategic. 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.”

That’s the real challenge facing enthusiast EVs right now. Everybody can build a fast electric crossover shaped like some sort of jellybean. But building something with the spirit of a Stinger—something low, dramatic, and charismatic—at a price that people can afford remains the hard part.

Still, the fact that Kia even wants to try says a lot. In an industry increasingly scared of taking risks, there’s something extremely encouraging about a company that can look at the future and even mutter the words “performance sedan.”