Fields of green
I was sitting in a Kia dealership last autumn and noted that a newly-delivered Sportage was in a strangely familiar shade of green. It struck me that it was identical to the Kensington Green used to launch the 1996 Rover 400-series. This particular hue was also variously called Woodcote Green if applied at the Cowley plant and Willow Green if (loosely) applied at Solihull. I think. The pain of paint fades over time.
Anyway, when I pointed this out to the salesman (this small dealer group started out with Rover, so we were on familiar ground), he rolled his eyes: “That colour is even less sellable than Kensington was back then. Kia forced this one on us. I knew it’d hang around forever.”
I tried to defend the colour as, despite popular opinion, I actually liked Rover’s green back in the day. The Kia looked quite striking, I thought, amidst a sea of grey, silver and white (technically, these aren’t colours, they’re ‘shades’).
“That colour,” the salesman continued confidently, “will never been seen in the brochures.”
Why? The answer was that nobody, but nobody, had preordered it, so it had been dropped before it was even launched, leaving any green lovelies to be forced upon the dealer network. Three months later, it was still in the showroom, although it had been relegated to the back corner and was heavily discounted.
If you want to stand out from the crowd and are not frightened of depreciation, there’s a bargain green Kia out there for you.