Kia
The Kia Forte is one of 124 Kia models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 2008. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Kia Forte properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 2000s were the decade of electronics — stability control, dual-clutch gearboxes and the first serious hybrids arrived while platform-sharing consolidated the industry into a handful of giants. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Tesla Tesla Roadster, the Nissan Nissan 370Z, the Volkswagen Volkswagen Tiguan — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Kia Forte reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1.6 L Hyundai Gamma engine#G4FC / Gamma Fuel injection#Multi-point injection / MPi CVVT Straight-four engine / I4 (Petrol engine / petrol) / 2.0 L Hyundai Theta engine#G4; drive goes through 5/6-speed Manual transmission / manual / 4/5/6-speed Automatic transmission / automatic; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Kia's own catalogue the Kia Forte sits alongside the Kia K5 (Optima), the Kia Magentis, the Kia KX Cross, the Kia KX7. The record names the Kia Cerato (2003–2008) / Kia Spectra as its predecessor and the Kia K4 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Kurt Kahls (2006) / Tom Kearns (2006). Assembly is recorded at South Korea: Hwaseong, Gyeonggi / Hwaseong (List of Kia design and manufacturing facilities#Hwaseong Plant / Hwaseong Plant) / China: Yancheng (List of Kia design and manufacturing.
For the years the United States federal record covers, EPA-rated economy comes in at 34 mpg combined, which works out near $2,200 a year in fuel at current prices.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Kia Forte costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.