A 1997 Kia Vigato just surfaced on Bring a Trailer with 33,000 miles, a five-speed manual, and an identity crisis that spans four countries. It looks like a Lotus. It wears Lotus-badged center caps. Its bones are pure Lotus Elan M100. But the badge on the title says Kia.
This is the only sports car Kia has ever produced, and the story of how it came to exist says more about the Korean automaker’s scrappy ambitions than any corporate timeline ever could.
The Elan M100 launched in 1989, right alongside the Mazda Miata, and immediately caught grief for being front-wheel drive. Lotus purists treated it like heresy. But anyone who actually drove the thing knew better.
Car and Driver tested one in 1991 and found the handling razor-sharp, the turbocharged four-cylinder engine genuinely entertaining, and the whole package a legitimate Miata rival. The problem was price. At nearly $40,000 in 1991 dollars, it was champagne on a beer budget market’s shelf.
Lotus pulled the plug in 1995. Kia swooped in and bought the tooling.
Think about where Kia stood in the mid-1990s. In North America, the brand was barely a blip — a handful of dealerships in Portland, Oregon, selling econoboxes that competed on price and not much else. Before that, the closest most Americans got to a Kia product was the Ford Festiva, a rebadged Korean import sold through Blue Oval dealers. Nobody associated the name with performance, sophistication, or anything remotely sporty.
Yet someone at Kia headquarters looked at that Lotus production line and saw a shortcut to credibility. They rebadged the M100 as the Kia Elan for the Korean market and the Kia Vigato for Japan. Same lightweight chassis. Same control-arm suspension. Same four-wheel disc brakes.
The later cars, including this one, got a 1.8-liter naturally aspirated engine rated at 155 horsepower — less exotic than the original turbo 1.6 but simpler and more reliable.
The example now up for auction was built for Japan, imported to Canada in November 2022, and previously sold on Bring a Trailer three years ago. It’s a British-designed car with an Isuzu engine, assembled in South Korea, shipped to Japan, then dragged across the Pacific to North America. The passport stamps alone make it a conversation piece.
Inside, there’s a wood-rimmed steering wheel, patterned cloth seats that scream 1990s, and a manually operated soft top. The Oz Racing five-spoke wheels still wear those Lotus center caps, a quiet reminder that this car’s DNA has nothing to do with the Sephia or the Sportage.
Kia has obviously come a huge distance since then. The EV6, the Stinger before it, the new EV9 — the brand now competes with luxury players and wins. But the Vigato represents something different. It was a bold, slightly weird gamble from a company that had no business building a sports car and did it anyway by buying someone else’s homework.
The auction closes April 9. Whoever wins gets a car that will stump every person at cars and coffee, confuse every Kia service advisor, and deliver genuinely engaging driving dynamics that most modern crossovers can only dream about. A collectible Kia sounds like a punchline. This one is the real thing.
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