Kia Sportage gets three diesel options

Kia has cleverly added diesel options to its popular Sportage range, two of which have no direct price range rivals. Braam Peens of CAR magazine samples the new CRDi model in the Mother City.

- Braam Peens

A cursory, and sometimes scary (given the price of new cars), glance across automotive segments provides a revelatory snapshot of buying trends in the South African passenger vehicle market.

The key take-outs are that nearly two-thirds of new vehicle sales now originate from compact and medium-sized SUVs, within which manual transmission equipped models are continually losing their appeal, making petrol automatics almost the default choice.

And what of diesels? There are a handful of options at the R300k-R400k entry point, a similar number between R700k-R900k, and a raft of seven-digit price picks thereafter. Between R500k and R700k, though, where what's left of the country's economically active middle-class is being forced to shop, there is not a single one.

Enter Kia, which trotted out a petrol version of the fifth-generation Sportage in September 2022 (incidentally, a contender for the 2023 South African Car of the Year), but has finally got around to adding a trio of oil-burning derivatives to the incumbent five-strong petrol line-up. These are the LX, EX and GT-Line Plus selling for R597 995, R651 995 and R735 995 respectively. In a welcome (and deliberate?) attempt at differentiation from its DNA-donating doppelgänger Hyundai, the Sportage does not feature the same 2-litre 137kW/416Nm turbo-diesel engine as the Tucson.