Kia Motors India has achieved yet another milestone in the Indian automotive industry. The carmaker now claims to have sold over 1,00,000 units of connected cars. Connected cars is an advanced technology wherein the customer’s smartphone, smartwatch and car’s infotainment system are integrated together to form a single unit.
The connected car technology which is offered by Kia is equipped with 57 unique features and comes with a free 3-year subscription. The key features included in the package are; cellular calling, weather information, time and date, Indian holiday information, cricket score, media control, navigation control and climate control. Kia likes to call this the ‘UVO Connect’ in-car technology which can be triggered inside the car by saying ‘Hello Kia’ and it responds to a host of voice commands as well. To improve the convenience of its customers, Kia has added some safety features like remote engine start/stop, stolen vehicle immobilisation, auto collision notification, remote smart pure air on, live car tracking and more.
The South Korea automaker also stated that more than 55% of its cars sold in India are equipped with the connected system which means one of the two Kia cars sold in India is a connected car. The top-selling variant is the Seltos GTX Plus DCT 1.4T Petrol which accounts for about 15% of the total connected car sales.
Kia has 3 models on sale in India, Seltos in the SUV segment, Sonet in the compact SUV segment and Carnival in the luxury MPV segment. The hotly contested compact SUV segment is currently being led by the Kia Sonet. Kia’s sales figure stood at 21,022 units for the month of November and it is 50% more than what it stood in the same month last year. A total of 11,417 units of the Sonet were dispatched whereas the figure for Seltos stood at 9,205 units. This made them the 4th largest car manufacturer in India with Maruti Suzuki topping the chart selling 1,37,700 units, followed by Hyundai with 48,800 units and then Tata Motors with a total of 21,600 units sales for the month of November 2020.