New Kia Rio and Picanto win best product design awards

It seems hiring Peter Schreyer formerly from Audi has paid Kia well. Besides providing the brand with a strong identity through a new corporate grille dubbed ‘tiger nose’, the new Kia Rio and Picanto models were awarded top honors in the 2012 red dot design competition under the internationally acclaimed ‘Product Design’ category.

More than 4,500 varieties of products across various sectors by 1,800 manufacturers from 58 countries took part in the competition.

Being one of the world’s major design contests, the coveted red dot is eligible to products featuring the highest standards of design after undergoing various stringent tests by an international jury of design experts. This year’s awards will be held in July at the Alvar Aalto-designed opera house in Essen, Germany.

With the Rio and Picanto, Kia has totaled six red dot awards since 2009 starting with the Soul crossover. The Venga MPV, Sportage and Optima followed with an award each in the following years. Pretty similar to winning the Best Picture category in the Academy Awards, the Optima also claimed the ‘best of best’ title last year, where only one supreme product from each category is eligible for the highest accolade.

As Thomas Oh, Kia’s Senior Executive Vice President and COO understands design is an upcoming factor as global buyers are switching to smaller cars. The Rio and Picanto endorses Kia’s commitment to providing excellent value for money, with striking design and high quality that is also friendly to the environment.

As the automotive industry is seeing red, this strategy has been successful as the Rio and Picanto are in great demand and sales volumes are on the rise globally.

Obviously Kia’s Chief Officer Peter Schreyer is beaming with joy. He takes the twin win as tributes for the entire design team from all three design centres at Korea, Europe and America and is proud and happy about the successful collaboration between the design centres.

Besides the red dot awards, the Rio was named best in the ‘Exterieur’ class at the automotive brand contest last year and an iF product design award in 2012 was awarded to the three door Picanto becoming the fourth Kia model to do so.