Kia Bongo
car model
The Kia Bongo (Hangul:기아 봉고), also known as the Kia K-Series or Kia Besta, is a cabover pickup truck and van produced by the South Korean automobile manufacturer Kia since 1980.
The Bongo was first launched in 1980 under the name Bongo. In 1997, the third generation Bongo Frontier was launched. As of 2004, the Kia Bongo was in its fourth version, confusingly sold as the Kia Bongo III. "Frontier" was dropped from the name with this revision.
Background
Kia has produced small and large trucks for the South Korean market for at least 25 years. Rear-wheel-drive Bongo trucks have been on the market in Korea since at least the late 1980s, and these were equipped with a four-cylinder diesel engine. They have occasionally been sold with various surnames such as Kia Bongo Frontier (third generation Bongo), which was replaced by the Kia Bongo III in 2004, and under a variety of names in different export markets. The Bongo Frontier was one of the first Kia cars to be exported to Europe and South America.
In some markets, such as Europe, Australia and South America, the Bongo is branded as the Kia K-Series or the Kia Frontier, which includes the K2400 and K2700. In Taiwan, it is known as the Kia Kaon, while in Vietnam, it is manufactured under license by THACO and sold as the THACO Kia New Frontier.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q484508. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1997 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kia Bongo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.