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26 - The Oakville Beaver, Wednesday July 19, 2006 www.oakvillebeaver.com 2007 Kia Magentis Continued from Page 23 Auto EVERYTHING For my part, the four-cylinder was surprising because of its willingness to put the power down. I only drove the five-speed manual. Trapped behind lines of tourist-speed drivers, passing was something I did a lot. The Magentis would hum along in third with the revs up around 3000 and a touch of trailing throttle, just right for getting a jump on the pass. I watched the tach swing up to around 6,000 before changing up to fourth gear by which time I had completed the pass. Passing four in a row meant getting up to fifth with the clutch biting solidly with no loss of power or revs on the upshifts. I was having fun! The only downside of this was getting used to the clutch take-up from a stop. I found myself feeding in the power and easing up on the clutch pedal only to have it bit like a pit-bull causing me to jerk forward. My Quebec pal stalled twice at one traffic light. With age, use and familiarity, a strong clutch proves to be a friend in the long run because it abets spirited motoring. But like a Porsche, it takes practice and patience. Handling is night and day different from the 2006, a car that's nice enough if a bit slow with quality of ride that's strongly on the boulevardier side. The 2007 Magentis abandons dual wishbones at the front for MacPherson with an independent multilink setup at the rear. While the pundits always say wishbones make for superior handling pointing to F1 racers, BMW has been using MacStruts for more than 30 years on the 3-Series that is considered the benchmark for sports sedans. And with the MacStruts being 139 pounds lighter than the wishbones they supplant, it can only add to the quality of the ride and handling. The new four-cylinder is not only 16 per cent more powerful than the one it replaces, but it is also 45 per cent lighter because it is all aluminum rather than cast iron. Couple this with an all-new chassis and it's not surprising the Magentis goes and feels like it does. It's a real indicator of how the Koreans have listened, looked and learned and how they had narrowed that manufacturing gap. Kia thinks the four-cylinder is going to be the big seller in the Magentis mix, accounting for something like 70 per cent of sales. Tesser said Kia sold 2,000 of the 2006 Magentis in Canada. For 2007 internal projections are for 56,000 for Tesser saying he thinks it will be closer to 10,000. And it's all starting to pay off. At this writing, Kia is coming off its best quarter ever and April set a one-month sales record. Kia is using the slogan "the power to surprise," and that's just what's going to happen when customers take the new Magentis out for a test drive.