Facelift in steps
Since its introduction in 2016, sales of the Kia Niro have increased almost every year. We see here mainly much more recent copies, with a slightly modified nose and butt compared to the original. This change did not come overnight, but gradually.
The fact that the Niro has been selling like hot cakes in recent years is of course mainly due to the arrival of the fully electric e-Niro in 2018. That ensured that sales rose to almost 10.00 units a year later, a magical limit. which was exceeded in 2020.
That explains why you mainly see Niro’s in traffic with those boomerang-shaped LEDs in the front bumper. They first appeared in 2018, on the electric Niro that we would eventually come to know as e-Niro. It also distinguished itself with new LED headlights, a redesigned front bumper with a large central air intake, a separate rear bumper with a ‘hole’ on each side and a closed grille.
Initially we grouped this all under the heading ‘specific for the e-Niro’, but later it turned out that many of these changes would also apply to the hybrid and plug-in hybrid versions. They received a similar front and rear bumper in February 2019, although there are still minor differences. For example, the reflector/reversing light combination in the rear bumper of the hybrids is upright and the shape of the central air inlet in the front bumper is different. We also count not one, but two ‘boomerangs’ per side in the variants with a combustion engine. They replace the original daytime running lights, which are incorporated in the bumper on the original Niro as part of a halogen fog lamp. The grille is still black in the hybrids, but also clearly different than before. The ‘tigernose narrowing’ in the middle is now actually cut out of the bumper, where this was previously provided by a silver strip and some extra plastic.
Compared to the e-Niro, the facelift Niros distinguish themselves with two more important features: new taillights and a revised dashboard. The rear lights are recognizable by a different LED drawing, the dashboard went quite a bit on the shovel. Reclining and lower ventilation grilles make room for a larger touchscreen. What you could have foreseen in 2019, actually happened a little later: the electric e-Niro also got the new dashboard and the modified taillights.
Is that done with that? Well no. Later still, in 2021 and thus towards the end of the life of this Niro, Kia quickly pasted its new emblem on the nose and bottom of the (in the Netherlands) most popular model. That is quite a major change, because unlike the old logo, the fresh logo is simply stuck on the body and the cutouts made for the old logo are no longer cut into the car from last year. Those Niros are therefore easy to recognize, but the youngest Niro is of course that of the completely new generation.
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl