- Kia showed a hatchback version of the new K4 compact and confirmed it’s coming to the U.S.
- The previous-gen Forte didn’t offer a hatchback version in America.
- We don’t have exact timing, but Kia says the hatchback version is coming “at a later date.”
Although the outgoing Kia Forte was offered only as a sedan in the U.S., many of its compact competitors—namely the Honda Civic, Mazda 3, and Toyota Corolla—also offer a hatchback variant. Now we know that Kia is remedying that with the new 2025 K4, as the company showed a new hatchback version at the New York auto show and confirmed that it will come to the U.S.
The K4 hatch looks quite different than the sedan, at least aft of the B-pillar. It incorporates a “floating roof” design with an interestingly shaped chrome trim piece around the rear window and D-pillar. The taillights are similar to the sedan’s, with LED lighting strips stretching nearly the width of the car. The relatively upright hatchback shape looks promising for the cargo area, which should offer more space than the sedan’s trunk.
We expect the hatchback to share its powertrains with the sedan, meaning it will offer a 147-hp naturally aspirated 2.0-liter inline-four in lower trims and a 190-hp turbocharged 1.6-liter inline-four in the GT-Line Turbo model.
Kia referred to the hatchback as the K4 5-door hatch, but we don’t yet know what the official name will be. The company previously used the “5” designation for models such as the Rio 5 and Forte 5, but K4 5 doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Kia didn’t provide exact timing for the K4 hatchback’s arrival, but did say it’s coming “at a later date.” The K4 sedan is scheduled to go on sale in the U.S. in the second half of this year, so the hatch might arrive by the end of the year or in early 2025. Look for more details to come over the next few months.
Despite being raised on a steady diet of base-model Hondas and Toyotas—or perhaps because of it—Joey Capparella nonetheless cultivated an obsession for the automotive industry throughout his childhood in Nashville, Tennessee. He found a way to write about cars for the school newspaper during his college years at Rice University, which eventually led him to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan, for his first professional auto-writing gig at Automobile Magazine. He has been part of the Car and Driver team since 2016 and now lives in New York City.