WHERE THE TIGER NOSE BEGAN
Within a year of his arrival at Kia, Peter Schreyer and his Kia team (including his former VW colleague Gregory Guillaume) had fleshed out the basics of Kia’s new family design style, including the all-important tiger nose grille, in a two-door, fourseat concept called the Kia Kee.
Interestingly, the car was similar in dimensions and mechanical layout to the Audi TT, for which Schreyer was already famous, but completely different in look. Schreyer was keen to prove that even in a vehicle with similar parameters to a well-known and successful coupé, Kia could find very much its own share.
The tiger nose wasn’t as developed as it is today and didn’t even carry the name. (The designer was initially reticent about that.) Schreyer designed it by chance while ‘taping’ an existing model and found that it worked. The name came during internal discussions about the new grille’s three-dimensional quality. “Think of an animal’s muzzle,” Schreyer told his audience, “like the nose of a tiger.” And there it was.