Kia state-of-the-art design center at California
The new Kia US corporate campus has got rolling at Irvine in California. The new 21.7-acre Kia campus has been built on an investment of $130 million and will house the Kia Motors America Corporate Headquarters and state-of-the-art Kia Design Center America (KDCA), said a news source.
The corporate base is being described as a custom-built facility which will have the Kia Motors America sales division, and wings such as marketing, public relations, consumer affairs, technical service, research and development, product planning and administration departments under one roof. It also houses the Kia Motors America western region office and IT services. A significant step in Kia history, the Irvine campus boasts of close to 400 permanent full-time employees. At full capacity, it could house as many as 600 employees.
The new U.S. corporate headquarters and Design Center has been built to develop products specifically for Kia that are designed and tuned for North American consumers, the company has said. The company which had kick-started operations in the country 15 years ago at the Orange County sees the new development as yet another step toward success in the US car mart.
Set up on a sprawling 1,00,700-sq ft space, the design center will enable the Kia Motors US design team to go about in making designs that would aim to capture a good share of the car market. Complete with a design studio, a modeling studio that allows up to eight vehicle models to be worked on simultaneously, a milling shop, a 2-D presentation room, a 3-D presentation room, a paint booth, a private outdoor viewing courtyard, a research library, among other unique facilities, the design centre is expected to maximize Kia designers creativity as time goes by.
It has been pointed out that Kia becomes one of the first companies in Irvine to voluntarily install a bioswale system in its parking lot to remove silt and pollution from surface water runoff, thereby playing a part in green initiatives too.