The stylish station wagon-hatch Kia Proceed is no longer for us - it turned out to be too niche even by the standards of Koreans, who generously indulge Russia with all kinds of non-formatting. But the rest of the Ceed family is still in service: both the traditional hatchback with a station wagon and the non-binary XCeed. Today they have all been renewed, although not to say what is serious - for example, "X", as the youngest, did not even touch their appearance. And the organizers, apparently, did not consider the new power unit a weighty enough reason to drag the car to the presentation.
No problem! You can also feel the fresh 1.5 T-GDI turbo engine on regular Sids. Europeans have known this engine since last year, and now it has reached Russia in a slightly deformed form - 150 horsepower instead of 160 with the same torque of 253 Nm. In terms of taxes, this is all the more profitable, and it seems that the power has decreased only on paper: the passport acceleration of 8.6 seconds to a hundred has remained unchanged. And if we compare with the previous 140-horsepower turbo engine 1.4, which was installed on pre-styling "Sids", the gain is six tenths. Not bad!
Do you want to stand out from the stream with such a red color? Please shell out for the GT Line version - it's only available there. And for the usual Kia Ceed, a new lemon shade was in store, not so flashy, but also cheerful
The same word also describes how such a Ceed drives. The character can not be called fighting and incendiary, but in modern eco-realities, one should rejoice already in the fact that the engine does not seem to be strangled, and the accelerator is damped. More importantly, there is a modified seven-speed "robot" here: it switches faster and smoother than its predecessor and does not itch in traffic jams, although it still does not like sharp starts from a standstill - the hitch in the name of saving clutches has decreased, but has not disappeared altogether.
And yet, if earlier the transmission served as some kind of irritant, now you practically do not notice it and you just enjoy acceleration. The hatch easily and pleasantly accelerates in city traffic, and on the highway does not sour up to about 150 km / h: this is how a normal modern car should be. Actually, for a European buyer, this is the golden mean between a three-cylinder turbocharger with 100 hp and a 204-horsepower version of the GT.
After excluding the Proceed GT version from the Russian line, the only car with a 200-horsepower 1.6 turbo engine was the XCeed. And it is clear that sales of such machines will be in the tens of a year at best.
The Russian picture is, of course, sadder. From now on, 150 hp is a driver's delicacy, available only to hatchbacks and station wagons in the GT Line trim level. Previously, such performances were not brought to us, and in vain: seats with developed lateral support and sports accents in the cabin have not harmed anyone yet. And after the restyling, a new front bumper appeared here with a cool design of the side air ducts - there is in this something from the cunningly predatory "Sid" of the previous generation, which is still dearer to me than the current one. But the faceted diode lights on the Ceed GT Line hatchback are a controversial thing: they look somewhat ali-expressive.