Kia takes first place in Auto Bild magazine's Quality Report 2015

Kia Motors has been named in first place according to the Quality Report 2015 published by Auto Bild magazine (issue 50/2015), which rates customer satisfaction, reliability and long-term quality of the 20 leading automotive brands on the German market. Kia shared the top position with Mazda with an overall rating of 2.14 (on a scale of 1 to 5).

Auto Bild's annual quality report, which was first published in 2001, calculates each manufacturer's overall rating based on seven sets of data – the results of a Forsa customer satisfaction survey (8,187 respondents) commissioned by Auto Bild, the number of vehicle recalls and incidences of remedial work, the latest TÜV report (almost 9 million general technical inspections), manufacturers' warranties and three categories contributed by the Auto Bild editors themselves: long-term vehicle test results, garage test results and analysis of criticisms from more than 10,000 reader letters that pour into the magazine's "Kummerkasten" (agony column) every year.

"Our quality aspirations extend from our R&D centers, design studios and production facilities – more than half of new Kia cars sold in Germany come off the production line at our cutting-edge European factory in Slovakia – to the sales and service areas of the business where we have made great strides by restructuring our dealership network and living up to our promise of placing top priority on continuously increasing quality," said Steffen Cost, COO of Kia Motors Germany.

Thanks to its industry-leading 7-year manufacturer's warranty in Europe, Kia was the only carmaker to be awarded a score of 1 for its warranty. But the brand also scored exceptionally high in the customer satisfaction survey, number of recalls (none at all to date in 2015) and "Kummerkasten" complaints, while it consistently received "very good" to "good" results in all long-term tests on Kia vehicles (at least 100,000 km).