At some point Kia board members must have trooped down to the design center in Namyang for a formal signoff. Still not a word.

Now a Stinger—a GT2 version deluxe ($50,100, as tested), with a throat-singing V6, rear-wheel drive, adaptive suspension, brakes for days—is sitting in front of my house, giving local dads the vapors. The want is strong. The first time Kia tried to bootstrap itself into the premium/entry luxury space was in 2012, with the K900 sedan. But it presented as overstuffed and cut-rate, a large sedan with unsexy, front-drive proportions.

It’s a mistake the Stinger doesn’t make. It is extra rear-drive looking, with the front wheels thrust into the nose of the car (a long axle-to-dash) and rears slung under a fastback hatch. This car practically gyrates its hips at you.

And still, when I sit in the driver’s seat, my eye is irresistibly drawn to this one, centrally located blemish, as if it were a blackhead on a co-worker’s nose.

It’s the steering wheel hub cover. Not even the rim, which is flat-bottomed and wrapped in stitched and perforated leather; but the hard, plasticy hub cover, under which resides the driver air bag. Against the backdrop of Nappa leather seats, lustrous aluminum trim and soft-touch materials, the wheel hub feels like an overturned Tupperware bowl. Mr. Kia, your slip is showing.

Does it matter? Strictly speaking, no. It’s not like anyone is going to walk away from the 167-mph Stinger GT peeved about the hub cover. And there is always tape. But insofar as the Stinger was built to make you forget previous Kias, and largely does, the steering wheel only reminds you.

Some housekeeping: The Stinger is officially a midsize hatchback sedan, with four doors and a rear liftgate. But this is a fairly big car: 190.2 inches long over a 114.4-inch wheelbase, 60% of overall length. It’s also low (55.1 inches at the roof). These louche proportions disguise an unexpected usefulness: 23.3 cubic feet of cargo room and a spacious rear cabin.

Our GT2 test car squatted on 19-inch alloys wrapped in 40-series summer Michelins. Bang.

‘The brand has become typecast as down-market and generic. Kia needed some heat in the britches. Enter the Stinger.’

The bones are in the right place: a longitudinally mounted front engine, rear-wheel drive, near 50/50 weight distribution, front strut and rear multilink suspension. Under that wealth of hood is either a turbocharged 2.0-liter 255 hp four or 3.3-liter 365-hp V6; an eight-speed transmission with paddle shifters; and rear-wheel drive. Torque vectoring all-wheel drive is a $2,200 option with either engine. There are five trim levels, priced from $31,900 (2.0L) to $51,400 (GT2 with all-wheel drive), plus $900 destination.

So are we to expect Kia to take on the Germans at their own game? Yeah, no. South Korea’s second-largest carmaker, behind corporate partner Hyundai, is a master of mass-market, value-priced automobiles. The company’s offerings dominated J.D. Power’s 2017 U.S. Initial Quality Study, for example.

But in all that success the Kia brand has become a bit shopworn, typecast as down-market and generic. Kia needed some heat in the britches. Enter the Stinger.

The Stinger is certainly the best German car ever to come out of South Korea. The pedigree starts with Kia chief design officer Peter Schreyer, formerly of Audi. Kia European design chief Gregory Guillaume, based in Frankfurt, penned the exterior. The chassis tuning and dynamics fell to Albert Biermann, the former director of BMW ’s M performance division, who was poached/joined the company in late 2014.

Here and there, the Teutonic influence reaches comic proportions. The rear hatch and taillamp assemblies are frankly derivative of the Audi Sportback. The flash of brightwork at the doors’ leading edges is very like a BMW. The Kia’s cabin design is a pastiche of the Mercedes-Benz, with three eyeball air outlets, tablet-style center screen, and banded aluminum switches. Talk about great minds thinking alike.

It drives pretty Germanically too. Herr Biermann’s elastomeric choices have yielded a firmly sprung sport sedan, but it’s no track-day monster. There is a thoughtful amount of ride comfort dialed in to the chassis. The GT2 feels a tiny bit soft at the edges, to me. Nor is it exactly light—3,829 pounds in test trim. It exhibits more transient body roll than I prefer in my look-at-me man toys.

The electric power steering is very quick—2.2 turns, lock to lock, just the way I like it—but doesn’t have a lot of road feel in it. The big Brembo brakes are strong and sure if a bit touchy at first.

The Stinger will stand up. Zero-to 60 mph sprints pass in less than 5 seconds—Kia says 4.7 seconds but Car and Driver wrung a 4.4 out of it—and if you keep standing on the gas, a quick succession of gear changes and revving arpeggios take you to the quarter-mile stripe in about 13 seconds. The powertrain engineers also did right by the engine sound: The 3.3-liter turbo engine puts out a nice low burble, surprisingly resonant for a turbo engine, that rises to a heated warble at 6,000 rpm.

Kia’s sport-sedan bananas are still a little green: Around-town and at part-throttle, the eight-speed transmission has moments of dithering delay (the mapping is much better in Sport mode). The car could use some stiffer springs.

But, man oh man, the price is hard to beat. Where’s that tape?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3941767&forum_id=2#35784037)

Door thunk?

What do you have in mind?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3941767&forum_id=2#35804064)

So are we to expect Kia to take on the Germans at their own game? Yeah, no.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3941767&forum_id=2#35803250)