PARIS — The average international auto show is a big place. Frankfurt's biannual expo stretches across multiple halls and countless acres, seemingly taking up half of Germany. Tokyo's show is stuffed into several warehouses, each the size of a 747 hangar. And Paris — lovely, lovely Paris — is home to a circuslike monster that sprawls across eight huge buildings and a rambling, multilevel campus.
For that reason, it's easy to miss some of what's there. Press access to the show lasts two days, and even then, covering and running and writing and running and covering, it's still possible to not see everything. Myself, I almost missed the Kia Pop, stuffed off in a corner of Kia's stand, which is itself stuffed off in a second-floor corner of the show, relegated to the same quiet room as Euro-unfriendly marques like Chevrolet and Cadillac.
Still, the Pop was worth discovering. We've mentioned Kia's electric city-car concept here before, but a brief recap: It's 118 inches long, or one whole foot longer than a Smart ForTwo. It somewhat resembles the Smart and Toyota's iQ, and like those cars, it's aimed at Europe's ever-strong city-car market. (Walking the streets of Europe, it often seems that there are more Smarts, iQs, and shoebox-sized cars in cities like Paris and Frankfurt than there are cars in New York City, period. To state the obvious, small countries beget small roads beget small cars. But I digress.)
The Pop's glass is weird, its windshield a shallow oval and its side windows shaped like (and the approximate size of) elephant suppositories. The doors butterfly off up and off of the car's sides, which makes no sense at all on a city car but is nevertheless fun to play with. Kia says the Pop can hold three people — two in the flat bench seat up front, one in the jumpseat in the rear — but it's probably more like two and a very small piece of luggage, or one fat American and a very large bag of french fries.
Silly though it is, the Pop is kind of encouraging. Kia isn't likely to build a production version of the car, but it's a silly concept, and as we've stated before, silly concepts are always nice to see. Maybe one day small city EVs will become the exception rather than the rule. Maybe one day we'll have pill-shaped windows and funky, futuristic dashboards. Maybe I'll visit Paris and drive my bag of *pommes frites *around in a car that looks like moon-man transport, and maybe whimsy will come back in fashion in the car world. Either way, the thought was worth trudging miles and miles across the Paris show for. I might even trudge back to take a second look.
Photos: Sam Smith/Wired.com
