The Forgotten Korean V8 Flagship With Reclining Rear Seats That’s Cheaper Than A New Corolla

7 minutes reading

Wednesday, 30 Sep 2026 17:00 0 5 autotech

Full-size luxury sedans rarely disappear from memory as completely as this one did. It arrived with a V8 engine, a rear seat that reclines like a first-class airline seat, and a badge nobody expected to see on a $60,000 car. Critics were impressed. Buyers mostly shrugged. A decade later, that indifference has become the smartest kind of opportunity. Here is a genuine flagship luxury sedan, loaded with features that still feel special today, sitting on used lots for less money than a brand-new economy car. Here’s the story of the car everyone forgot, and why that’s good news for you.

Table of Contents

A Full-Size Luxury Sedan With Features That Still Feel Expensive Today

2016 Kia K900 front 3/4 shot

Kia

The 2017 Kia K900 V8 Brings Rear-Seat Luxury And Serious Power For Used-Car Money

The car in question is the 2017 Kia K900, specifically the range-topping Luxury V8 trim. Kia’s first serious attempt at a full-size, rear-wheel-drive flagship sedan launched in the United States for 2015, aiming squarely at the Lexus LS and Hyundai’s own Genesis (a sibling brand under the same corporate umbrella). It never caught on. Annual US sales measured in the low thousands, sometimes barely cracking a thousand units, against tens of thousands for the LS and S-Class. Most buyers simply couldn’t get past seeing a Kia badge on a car pushing past $60,000.

That sales failure is now the used-car buyer’s gain. Search current listings, and you’ll find clean, low-mileage 2017 K900 V8 Luxury models, cars that stickered north of $60,000 when new, changing hands for roughly $10,000 to $15,000, with a handful of nicer examples creeping toward $19,000. Compare that to a new 2026 Toyota Corolla sedan, which starts north of $23,000 before options, and the math becomes almost absurd. You can buy a decade-old, full-size, rear-wheel-drive luxury flagship with a naturally aspirated V8 for less than the price of a brand-new compact economy sedan with a four-cylinder engine and cloth seats.

The 2017 model year is a smart target within the K900’s short run. It kept the blind-spot monitoring and rear cross-traffic alert Kia added as standard equipment that year, without the mid-cycle changes that came with the heavily revised K900 (later sold in some markets simply as the K9) starting in 2019. It’s the sweet spot of feature content and depreciation.

Its 420-HP V8 Makes It Far More Than Just A Comfortable Highway Cruiser

Not every 2017 K900 has the V8. The base Premium and mid-level Luxury trims used a 3.8-liter V6 making 311 horsepower and 293 pound-feet of torque, a perfectly capable engine but not the headline act. The one worth chasing is the range-topping Luxury V8 trim, powered by a 5.0-liter naturally aspirated V8 producing 420 horsepower at 6,400 rpm and 376 pound-feet of torque at 5,000 rpm, sent through an eight-speed automatic to the rear wheels.

That output figure matters because it wasn’t just competitive for the segment in 2017, it was genuinely strong. It out-muscled the base V8 in a contemporary Lexus LS 460 and comfortably eclipsed the six-cylinder Genesis G80 of the same era. Zero to 60 mph arrives in roughly the mid-five-second range, brisk for a sedan weighing close to 4,800 pounds.

This isn’t a numb, isolated highway appliance content to waft along at 70 mph. Prod the throttle and the V8 responds with real urgency, backed by a soundtrack that’s more muscular than most luxury sedans bother to offer. Kia also gave the K900 proper rear-wheel-drive dynamics rather than a front-drive platform dressed up in luxury trim, so the chassis has genuine balance to match the power. It’s a flagship that can be enjoyed by the driver, not just endured by the passengers.

Reclining Rear Seats And Premium Materials Give Passengers The First-Class Treatment

2016 Kia K900 rear seating
Kia
2016 Kia K900 dash
Kia
2016 Kia K900 seating
Kia

If the front seat is about power, the back seat is where the K900 Luxury V8 makes its real case. Top trims added a reclining function for the outboard rear seats, complete with an extendable leg rest, essentially replicating a business-class airline seat in the back of a sedan. Add heated rear outboard seats, a power rear sunshade for privacy and glare control, and rear-seat climate controls, and Kia built a genuine chauffeur-spec experience into a car that most people had never heard of.

Space backs it up. The K900 rides on a 119.9-inch wheelbase and stretches 200.6 inches overall, dimensions that translate into 38.2 inches of rear legroom, on par with or better than several established luxury rivals from the same period. Materials throughout carry real weight too: quilted Nappa leather upholstery, genuine wood trim, and a Lexicon-branded 17-speaker surround sound system that remains a genuine standout even against newer premium audio setups.

None of this reads like a value play on paper. It reads like a description of a car costing twice as much. That disconnect between what the K900 delivers and what it costs today is precisely the point.

How It Lost 80% Of Its Value And Why That’s Your Gain

Depreciation is usually the enemy of a used-car buyer. With the K900, it’s the entire appeal. A Luxury V8 model that stickered at roughly $62,000 new now regularly trades for $10,000 to $15,000, a decline of somewhere around 75 to 80 percent from its original MSRP. Kelley Blue Book data puts the K900 in the steepest depreciation bracket among its 2017 sedan peers, and that’s before accounting for how far below its true rivals it started in the first place.

The reasons are straightforward. Badge perception kept new-car buyers away in droves, which meant a thin used supply chasing even thinner demand, which in turn crushed resale values faster than the car’s actual quality warranted. Kia’s five-year, 60,000-mile warranty and generally strong reliability record haven’t been enough to convince the used market to value it the way it values a comparable Lexus.

For a buyer today, none of that history matters nearly as much as the outcome. Here is a genuinely well-engineered, feature-rich, V8-powered flagship sedan, for money that barely covers a down payment on the car it was built to compete with. Budget for fuel (the EPA rates the V8 at just 15 mpg city and 23 mpg highway, a real-world trade-off for that power) and factor in that parts and specialist knowledge are rarer than with a mainstream Kia. But for someone chasing genuine luxury-car presence, comfort, and power on a used-economy-car budget, the 2017 Kia K900 V8 remains one of the more compelling, and most overlooked, bargains on the used market today.