One year on and Kia cee’d SW tops retail sales chart

Just one year since its introduction to the UK new car market and the Kia cee’d SW has raced ahead of its competitors to top the retail sales chart for estate cars.

Capturing more than 23 per cent of all retail C segment estate sales the well-packaged and sensibly-priced cee’d SW is appealing in increasing numbers to motorists who are spending their own money. And market statistics show that the estate car is holding its popularity amongst hard-pressed buyers.

So far this year Kia have sold 875 cee’d SWs into the retail market – comfortably ahead of competitors from Ford, Peugeot, Renault, Volkswagen and Vauxhall – all of whom focus much more on the fleet segments.

The performance also reflects Kia’s focus on the retail segment with almost half of all cee’d sales, including SW and pro_cee’d, coming in the retail segment – contrary to the industry as a whole where only 27 per cent of sales are to private buyers.

Paul Philpott, Managing Director of Kia Motors (UK) Limited said: “The C segment remains the biggest area of new car sales in the UK market but we are seeing a distinct difference in fleet and retail preferences. Retail buyers are looking to make their money go further and are much more likely to look at estates – even though the larger sales numbers still lie within the fleet sector.

“Our performance so far this year shows that since cee’d SW was launched in September last year our decision to promote its excellent balance of space, convenience, quality and good value to the retail customer was the right one. To be topping the sales chart within one year of going on sale is a major achievement and is just another contributing factor to the growth of the brand and the profitability of our dealer network,” he added.

And recently the demand for cee’d SW on the used market has also shown that the car is perfectly suited for private buyers. In recent auctions the SW models achieved 109 per cent of CAP Clean and considering that CAP had revised forecasts up earlier this year by five per cent the SW was achieving 114 per cent of originally quoted values.