It's hardly been a decade since Kia's cheap little budget cars were the butt of jokes.
And now, after ushering in a whole range of competent and relatively stylish compact cars and SUVs, the Korean brand is building the elegant rear-wheel drive sedan that you see here.
These official sketches give us our best idea to date of how Kia's first rear-wheel drive sedan will look and it has an elegance about it seemingly inspired by the likes of Aston Martin and Maserati.
It's also due rather soon, the unnamed sedan scheduled to be launched in Korea in the first half of this year, although the international on-sale date has yet to be confirmed.
You'll no doubt make up your own mind about the styling but for what it's worth, Kia reckons it'll have no trouble standing apart from its rivals thanks to a “distinctive, modern and classic” design.
That's as much as we can tell you about it for now, Kia keeping the specifics a secret until the imminent unveiling but we'd expect it to be fairly closely based on Hyundai's 5 Series-sized Genesis sedan, in which case it would use similar engines - these being a 193kW 3.3 V6, 213kW 3.8 V6 and 269kW 4.6 V8. We'd bet our bottom dollar on the latter forming part of the line-up at launch.
One of Kia's directors, Soon-Nam Lee, is particularly proud of the new halo product: “Our all-new flagship sedan integrates all of our key capabilities such as design, performance, high-tech features and infotainment into one striking model.