Concept Car of the Week: Kia POP (2010)

The urban car is one of the most difficult vehicles to design. From the very foundation of its brief, it is freighted with all sorts of automotive and urban design baggage. What is the best size and shape for the city? What is the ideal powertrain (answer: electric)? Should it be future-proofed and fitted with autonomous features? If so, how will it interface with other vehicles and the city? Should it even be there at all?

That is lot of heavy questions for one car design to answer.

BMW deserves a huge commendation for their i3 ‘megacity’ concept and, later, the production car. It attempted to solve so many problems, and does many things very well. There’s a certain gravitas to the design.

But before the BMW i3 was announced, KIA presented its own urban car solution, the KIA Pop. The Pop was introduced – appropriately enough – at the 2010 Paris show and then, later that fall, in Los Angeles. The little concept car was conceived by Kia’s European design team under the direction of Peter Schreyer, Kia’s Chief Design Officer, and Gregory Guillaume, Kia Europe’s Chief Designer.

“A concept car like the Pop could only have come from Kia,” explained Guillaume. “Designers very rarely have the opportunity to start from a clean sheet of paper and it’s great to be in a position to operate with such freedom.”

The Pop was a two seat (with a +1 jump seat) for the city of tomorrow. It was vaguely wedge-shaped with a huge windscreen, oblong side windows, and a large hatch at the rear.

If the BMW i3 was the serious student, the Pop was the class clown, cleverly upending traditional notions of proportion and design. The body was chrome-colored and highly reflective. The interior was a vast purple field. The front and rear had backlit frit-dot patterns. The side elevation revealed a peculiar oblong side window and fender bulges that popped out (pun intended) over the wheels.

At just 3000mm long and 1700mm wide, it was certainly city-car sized. With room for two in comfort and three in a pinch, the Pop was ideal for city driving – and parking, as two Pops could fit (in tandem) in a standard parking space.

The windscreen looked like a diagonal slab angling across the front of the car, contributing greatly to its wedge-like shape. But seen from above, and from the inside, one can get a sense of just how large the glass is. From the seats – even the jump seat – a panoramic view is available both forwards and, importantly for the city, upwards, where the most dramatic views unfold as the car moves through the urban environment.

It was a fun exercise in the concept of Prospect and Refuge, and one that deserves more design consideration.

The cabin, which KIA described as “spaceship-like” is a Verner Panton-esque landscape of purple, where the interior shell of the car seems to morph into seats and back again, like a sort of interior Moebius Strip. The carpet on the floor is a deep purple with wavy pattern of pinkish dots that keep the eye moving and are just a bit unsettling. Sufferers of motion sickness beware.

The instrument panel has a small piece of plexiglass beyond the steering wheel showing a Transparent Organic LED (TOLED) display for speed, battery charge, and the other readouts when the car is running. At other times it is totally transparent.

To the right of the steering wheel was a sculpted, chrome-look panel that featured only one button, with every other function (audio, sat-nav, climate control, etc.) controlled via an animated touch screen. It was a preview of today’s touch screen focused interiors.

The powertrain was to be an electric one, with a 50kW (60PS), 190Nm motor powered by lithium polymer gel batteries. The Pop could be recharged in six hours and had a top speed of 140km/h, with a range of 160 kilometres (99 miles).

If the shape of the Pop looks vaguely familiar, some might remember the Sebring Vanguard CitiCar of the 1970s. A wedge-shaped, no-frills electric runabout, the tiny car managed to stay in limited production for six years and was, until this century, the number one bestselling electric car in the United States, finally surpassed by the Tesla Model S.

Unfortunately, the no-frills minimalism of the car extended to the design quality as well, and gave electric cars in general a reputation as the hair shirt of automotive design, best left to the ascetic whose moral compass forbade virtually all contact with either consumer or petrolhead culture.

The Pop avoided this fate by being so outrageously fun and irreverent. It managed to break all the rules of design, and yet managed to stay safely within the boundaries of automotive design, at least most of them. KIA mentioned outside influences as well, such as gliders and high-speed bicycles. Some critics noted that the various curves and bulges suggested amphibian influence, too.

The Pop is also reminiscent of L’Oeuf Electrique, a car built by Paul Arzens during the worst days of Nazi-occupied Paris. That little bubble car was also electric-powered and its cheerful cheeky bubble form was a joyful addition to a very gray city in a very dark time.

The press and public reaction to the Pop was generally positive, though some have considered it a little too whimsical, even frivolous, given the funereal atmosphere permeating the automotive industry and world economy in 2010.

But, looking back after nearly a decade, the Pop seems more relevant than ever. As the debate over the fate of the automobile in the megacity has intensified, there is a need for a fun, city-sized car with its own design language to interface with city of tomorrow.

Is the Pop the urban car of tomorrow? Well, certainly not the only one, but it can be a model for a small city runabout that embodies great joie de vivre and just the right amount of cheeky attitude. All that and a good stereo system may just make that commute home bearable. If not, maybe KIA can make a camper version for overnighting in the car park..