Despite once claiming Australia's best new-car warranty, Kia Australia is happy to let others like Nissan take the title without a fight.
Kia Australia will remain at its seven-year/unlimited kilometre warranty despite many brands – including most recently Nissan – now exceeding its once industry-leading assurance period.
Speaking to journalists, Kia Australia CEO Damien Meredith said moving up from seven to 10 years to match rivals would simply not be effectful enough.
“It’s really, really important for us, as I've said many, many times, it gave permission for people to look at the brand in that period of time,” Meredith said.
“I think now, I think it's number three or number four in importance when they [customers] purchase a Kia.
“It has dropped down in the importance, [but] it’s still great for us. It still works very, very well for us. I think people have this residual aspect to it that we were first in regards to extending the tenure and length of warranty.
“But I’m not quite sure that it has the impact that it did 11 years ago.”
When Kia first rolled out its seven-year warranty in 2014, many rivals including Toyota, Mazda, and Nissan were still offering three-year periods.
In the last decade however, all major brands have moved to the market-standard five years, while others such as MG, Mitsubishi, and now Nissan have surpassed Kia with a 10-year period.
Meredith’s comments came just before Nissan Australia announced its new warranty, which covers 300,000km, while MG and Mitsubishi’s offerings are for 250,000km and 200,000km respectively.
When asked if a 10-year warranty could attract even more customers to Kia, Meredith said the longer warranty has done its job of drawing attention to the brand, but its strong product line-up is what convinces people to buy.
“I haven’t looked at it from that point of view to be quite honest, but we think the brand has evolved and moved on in that decade and we’re comfortable with the structure of warranty and the length of it,” Meredith said.
“It hasn’t hurt us. I suppose if you quantify it, if you looked at the warranty scoreboard or the warranty ladder, there should be some brands in front of us with longer warranties. But they’re not.
“It [warranty] has played a really important role, but there are now other aspects of the brand and other aspects of the product that mean why people purchase our brand.”
Last year, Kia Australia finished as the fourth most-popular car brand in the country, notching an 81,787 tally.
It was the most popular brand to offer a longer-than-five-year warranty behind Toyota (2441,296), Ford (100,170), and Mazda (95,987).
In fifth place was Mitsubishi (74,547) and MG (50,592) ended in seventh.
Nissan finished 2024 in ninth position with 45,284 sales, and rolled out its new warranty from January 1, 2025 for all new cars sold, while also backdating it to the start of 2021 for customers who continue to service with the brand.
Tung Nguyen has been in the automotive journalism industry for over a decade, cutting his teeth at various publications before finding himself at Drive in 2024. With experience in news, feature, review, and advice writing, as well as video presentation skills, Tung is a do-it-all content creator. Tung’s love of cars first started as a child watching Transformers on Saturday mornings, as well as countless hours on PlayStation’s Gran Turismo, meaning his dream car is a Nissan GT-R, with a Liberty Walk widebody kit, of course.
