Brings back memories of my first car. It was a 1997 RS, dark blue, automatic. Bought it on May 17, 1997 - twelve days before my 33rd birthday. I loved that car! I took it up to 110,502 miles by April 2007, when I traded it in for a year-old Chevy Cobalt at Enterprise Car Sales. I am now driving a 2016 Kia Forte, purchased used in 2019 at just under 55,000 miles (now 78,000 miles). Team Kia! Now I just have to keep the car thieves away. _(8/5/2022)_
This is my kind of car - no nonsense A to B transportation. For some reason the name of this car was changed to 'Mentor' for UK sales. Don't know why Kia bothered to change it.
I remember things like the body side molding coming off and has lids that wouldn't stay close and after a few years that center dash would roll up from the windshield back. I haven't seen a First or Second gen Sephia in a long time.
The dashboard pad rolled up on my Sephia (I know exactly what you're talking about!). I couldn't do anything about it - except live with it. Turned out fine; the rest of the car held up well (I kept up the maintenance - oil and other fluid changes). I decided to trade it in before it started giving me problems. (See my comment above.)
Actually Hyundai still was not merged with Kia back then. The Sephia uses one of the Mazda 323 platform to be maded, but no, it doesn’t mean that it’s a rebadged Mazda 323 model, because the Sephia is 100% Kia car made using Mazda platform for the base design of the Sephia, however the 1.6 engine is from Mazda.
