The Picanto has been on Dutch plates since 2004 and there are well over a hundred and fifty thousand of them here, almost every one of them petrol. There is always somebody after the next one, and always another one for sale down the road.
Three generations are in circulation. The first was registered here from 2004, the second from 2011, and the third arrived in 2017 and has been facelifted twice since. The car has not changed its job in all that time: small, light, five doors on nearly all of them, cheap to keep. Dutch road tax, the motorrijtuigenbelasting, is charged by weight, and a Picanto sits near the bottom of that scale. That is a large part of why they stay on the road as long as they do.
What is under the bonnet divides along the generations rather than along trim levels. The cars registered from 2004 to 2012 have a 1.0 or a 1.1, both of them four cylinder. From 2011 the 1.0 became a three cylinder, and that is the engine most Picantos here have, sold alongside a 1.25 and later a 1.2 four cylinder. A turbocharged 1.0 sits on the sportier trim of the third generation and there are a few thousand of those about. The diesel Kia offered in other markets never arrived in any number, so if you have been told your Picanto might be one, it almost certainly is not.
We will not quote a number on this page, it would be stale within weeks. These are the things that genuinely shift what we offer.
Kia sells these with a seven year warranty capped at 150,000 km, and it passes to the next owner in full provided the car was serviced at the intervals Kia prescribes. On a car at this price, a year or two of cover still to run is a large share of what the whole thing is worth. Find the service record before you ask for an offer, because the warranty is hard to lean on without it.
The Kappa petrol engines fitted from 2011 drive the camshafts with a chain, so there is no belt interval on them and no belt invoice we are going to ask you for. The oil takes its place. If the engine rattles for a second or two from cold, tell us, and tell us when it was last serviced and by whom.
Most Picantos here are manual. Where there is an automatic it is one of two things: a four speed torque converter box, or, on the later cars, an AMT, which is the ordinary manual gearbox with a computer working the clutch. An AMT pauses as it changes up, by design rather than as a fault. Say which of the two you have and how it moves off at a junction.
Two tyres, a windscreen and an exhaust come to a real fraction of what a Picanto fetches. That is why we ask for the last APK report, the Dutch roadworthiness test, with the advisories left on it rather than left out. Nothing on that report rules the car out. It does set the figure, and it sets it before we arrive rather than at the kerb.
The register covers the facts. The rest of it is only in your head, so this is the part of the request worth a minute.
If the car is still inside the seven years and under the mileage cap, yes. Kia makes the cover fully transferable to the next owner, on the condition that the prescribed services were carried out. That condition is why we ask for the record and not only for the date on the kentekencard.
Note how long the noise lasts and whether it clears, then tell us when the oil was last changed. We treat a noise at startup as something to put a figure on rather than something to argue about. At this end of the market, describing it accurately is worth more to you than having it looked at first.
Still worth asking. An old Picanto has a plain, busy market behind it, which is the kind of car we want. Put in the plate and the real reading and a figure comes back. If it turns out to be a small one, you are not obliged to take it.
No. The offer is free, there is no fee taken out of it later, and nothing is binding on you until you accept it.
Your number plate is all we need to start.
