I bought a Cinco new in Sept. 2004. I  should have suspected something when 2 days after purchase, the sunglasses holder literally fell apart in my hand. 2 months later they cut the price in half to sell that year's model. I was shortly to be shown why. 4 months after purchase, the car developed this habit is inexplicably dieing at stop lights. sometimes it would fire right back up. Others times it have to set, often for a couple of hours before it would start again. 3 dealers looked at it and none could find anything wrong. (So they said). Finally it started dieing as I was driving. Fortunately I had the manual transmission so I could just pop it out of gear and coast to a stop.
The car never got better than 21 MPG, worse than my Ford F150 pickup.
And went through tires like no body's business. I had to have it realigned 4 times in 40K miles.
Finally it died and refused to ever start again. I had it towed to the dealer who handled me a quote for $4,600. Seems the timing belt, which was supposed to last to 70K miles had broken at 48K. The valves crashed into the pistons and wrecked the engine. And Kia was refusing to honor the warranty. I handed him the keys and told him what he could do with his P.O.S. car.
Amount Paid (US$): 13,500
Condition: New
Model Year: 2004
Model and Options: Cinco LE /manual