Top 5 Expensive Cars the Kia Stinger GT Beats in a Drag Race

With a starting price of $39,250 including destination, the Kia Stinger GT has been a pleasant surprise to automotive enthusiasts.

In fact, we came away so impressed with the Korean automaker’s sports sedan that we named it AutoGuide.com‘s 2018 Car of the Year. There’s a lot more to the Kia Stinger GT than its 3.3-liter, twin-turbo V6 engine with 365 horsepower and 376 pound-feet of torque, but we all know everyone loves reading about zero-to-60 times. So we decided to compile a list of five expensive cars you might be surprised to hear would lose in a drag race with the Stinger GT.

SEE ALSO: Kia Stinger Wins AutoGuide.com 2018 Car of the Year Award

For this list, we used official zero-to-60 times published by the automakers rather than a third-party source. Kia says the Stinger GT does the sprint in 4.7 seconds, but it’s worth noting it has been tested to go faster.

It’s the cheapest of the five cars on the list, but the BMW 540i is still nearly $20,000 more than the Kia Stinger GT. Powered by a 3.0-liter TwinPower Turbo inline six-cylinder engine, the 540i is actually less powerful than the Stinger GT with 335 hp and 332 lb-ft of torque. As a result, the standard 540i hits 60 mph from a standstill in 4.9 seconds, while the xDrive all-wheel-drive variant matches the Stinger GT’s performance at 4.7 seconds. The BMW 540i xDrive, however, starts from $61,495.

Anytime BMW and Audi are mentioned, you can pretty much guarantee Mercedes-Benz is lurking. Although there’s a new CLS that is set to arrive dealerships in the near future, the current model is actually slower than the Stinger GT. The CLS 550 and CLS 550 4MATIC both accelerate to 60 in 4.9 seconds, powered by a 4.7-liter biturbo V8 engine generating 402 hp and 443 lb-ft of torque. So even though the Stinger GT has less power, it accelerates quicker and is much cheaper than the CLS 550’s starting price of $76,145. The all-wheel-drive 4MATIC model costs $2,500 more.

Kia itself wasn’t shy about comparing its Stinger GT to the Porsche Panamera. With a starting price of $86,050, the Panamera is more than double the Stinger GT and it’s noticeably slower in a sprint to 60 mph. The standard Panamera does it in 5.4 seconds, while the more expensive Panamera 4, priced from $90,650, takes 5.2 seconds. It probably doesn’t help that the Panamera with a 3.0-liter turbocharged V6 engine offers less performance with 330 hp and 331 lb-ft of torque.

Of all the expensive cars out there that the Stinger GT is faster than, none is probably more surprising than the Jaguar F-Type. Sure the Stinger GT doesn’t beat the high-performance F-Type R, but it is faster than the 3.0-liter supercharged V6 variant with 380 hp and 339 lb-ft of torque. That model takes 4.8 seconds to hit 60 mph from a standstill, and that’s at a cost of $81,745 – another car that’s double the Stinger GT’s starting price.

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