First the hamsters and now this: Kia creates a gaudy array of music themed Souls for SEMA

Previous Next

1 of 4

First the hamsters and now this.

Kia seems primed to win the award for the most garish vehicles at SEMA with its cornea-damaging array of music-inspired souls.

We really respect Kia as an automaker; they have come a long way and now make a range of great cars. But its taste for aftermarket offerings is a bit different.

The SEMA Souls are so ridiculous it takes my breath away. I won’t go into detail about all of them, as I am pretty sure that constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Instead, I will just focus on the worst offenders.

The Vans Warped Tour Soul looks like something that Ringo Starr might have seen in the midst of a terrible acid trip. Specifically, it looks a lot like someone melted the Yellow Submarine and then filled it with speakers.

The good news is that the Vans Warped Tour Soul has some fun features, like a pullout barbecue, a rooftop 50-inch monitor, and custom 20-inch wheels that look like they were stolen off steam locomotive. The car also features enough LED lighting effects to host a Daft Punk concert.

The Amped Soul has much more restrained looks than the Vans Warped Tour, but everything else about it is crazier.

The B-pillars have been removed to create suicide doors. These open to reveal an arsenal of JBL speakers loud enough to kill whales in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This isn’t a car anymore; it’s a $20,000 shell for your boom box.

I wonder, though, if the Soul’s engine produces enough torques to haul the honking set of arsenal of speakers. My guess is that you would probably need Hyundai’s 1,000 Genesis to do that. Fortunately, that’s already at SEMA.

Speaking of Hyundai, it owns 33 percent of Kia, and the music inspired Souls kind of makes me wonder if Hyundai is trying to sabotage the Kia from within. Or maybe Kia figured that if it made such – to put it politely – polarizing cars, people would just wind up talking about them.

If that is in fact the case, it seems Kia’s plan has worked brilliantly.