Picanto comes out

Believe us, this was a hard one to figure out. We’ve long been in doubt whether this is the new Kia Picanto – which we thought was a bit too early – or the new Hyundai Atos, for which we found the design a bit too close to the current Picanto. The latter is a strong argument against a Hyundai and convinced us to dig into that a bit deeper. And we can say that this is actually the all-new Kia Picanto, likely to be presented at the 2007 Frankfurt Motor Show and therefore just four years after the introduction of the first generation which still sells well. Maybe Kia wants to freshen-up the Picanto in order to let it make good money for yet a few years.

We gather that power will come from slightly re-worked variants of the current engines, namely the 1.0- and 1.1-litre four-cylinder petrol units delivering 61 and 65 bhp respectively. The 75-bhp CRDi diesel will certainly be on offer again, too, and we also hear rumours of a 97-bhp GTI-like cannon ball ...