Kia has a habit of collecting design trophies, and its latest is for a car you will never be able to buy. The Vision Meta Turismo — the brand’s futuristic, all-electric sports sedan concept — has picked up a Red Dot Award 2026: Design Concept in the Cars and Motorcycles category, adding to a shelf that already groans under the weight of past winners.
First shown at Milan Design Week, the Meta Turismo is Kia’s attempt to reimagine the grand tourer for a digital, battery-powered era. The exterior pairs an extreme cab-forward silhouette with soft, geometric surfacing, while the cabin leans into a lounge-like layout meant to feel more living room than cockpit. It is, in other words, the sort of sculptural statement that concept cars exist to make — and a rolling advertisement for Kia’s “Opposites United” design language.
The interesting part is inside
Where the Meta Turismo gets genuinely forward-looking is the interior, which splits the car into two distinct zones. The driver’s side is built for focus and control; the passenger side leans back into augmented-reality content served up through a 3D head-up display. Tying it together is Kia’s Add-Gear modular interface, which blends physical controls with digital layers so occupants can reconfigure how they interact with the car.
Kia also baked in three configurable “driving worlds”: Speedster dials up the sense of performance with visual, sound and lighting effects; Dreamer uses digital overlays for a calmer, more reflective urban drive; and Gamer turns the parked car into a gaming-style experience. It is a lot of screen and sensation for one vehicle, and a clear signal of where Kia thinks in-car experiences are heading.
“The Vision Meta Turismo represents an opportunity for us to experiment, challenge ourselves, and imagine future user experiences through design,” said Karim Habib, Executive Vice President and Head of Kia Global Design. “It’s rewarding to see that work resonate with the jury, and motivating to see our ‘Opposites United’ design philosophy continue to connect with people around the world.”
The usual caveat applies: concept-car flourishes rarely survive intact to the showroom, and features like the 3D HUD lounge and Gamer mode read more as mood board than product roadmap. But Kia’s track record suggests the underlying design thinking does filter down. The company’s 2025 PV5 WKNDR concept was named Red Dot’s “Best of the Best,” and its production EVs — the EV6, EV9, EV3 and EV4 — have each claimed the top honor in recent years. The Meta Turismo may be fantasy, but the design cues almost certainly are not.
