Kia XCeed Tuning

"Tuning guide to the best Kia XCeed modifications."

Before the new Kia XCeed was released we were being asked about modifications, upgrades and tweaks  for it, and outline them on this article for you.

We'll keep this page updated with all the best mods as and when they become available.

Kia took the awesome Ceed, extended the wheelbase by 85mm, and fitted 16-18 inch alloys,  on tweaked suspension and tweaked the styling to make a Crossover coupe that turns heads.

Revised bumpers and interior add the finishing touches, to make what we think is one of the best Kia's to date.

The XCeed is a good project car to carry out. We see lots of DIY modders wasting money on their XCeed doing the wrong mods and then having to start over. Follow our articles to avoid making the common mistakes

Top end bhp should be your overall aim with a nice fat wide peak torque band.

Smaller engines do not provide much of a return in terms of power so start with a bigger engine. Engine swaps are a good option if you have a small engine size.

Engine Tuning.

This list of the stages and kits are usually carried out by our members, decide how far you wish to go in your tuning project before you get started.

Getting the right motorsport upgrades for your planned usage of the car is essential. Stage 3 competition upgrades just don't work well on the road hard to control in slow traffic.

The XCeed was released with the following engines, and all give good gains when tuned.

• 1.0 T-GDi ISG (118 BHP)
• 1.4 T-GDi ISG (138 BHP)
• 1.6 CRDi ISG (114 BHP)
• 1.6 CRDi ISG (134 BHP)

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Stages of Tune

Stage 1 mods: Alloy wheels, Remap, Panel air filter, Sports exhaust, Suspension upgrade (drop 30-40mm), Lighter flywheel.

Stage 2 mods: Power/Sport clutch, fuel pump upgrades, high flow fuel injector, Ported and polished head, Fast road cam.

Stage 3 mods: Sports gearbox, Competition cam, Engine balancing, Internal engine upgrades (pistons/head/valves), Adding or upgrading forced induction (turbo/supercharger).

Your aims when tuning should be a nice flat torque curve. You want to avoid sending all the torque to be at the top end of the rev range unless you are creating a competition car.

The whole point of our advice is to give a starting base of car tuning mods and point you in the right direction, our forum is the place to go for detailed advice and tips on your modified car project, the best modified modifications and all aspects of modding cars.Fast road cams offer one of the biggest bhp gains for your money as far as a single upgrades goes on a NASP engine.

The intake and exhaust flow play a large part in your cars power band, but be careful here, getting this wrong can upset the idle and make the car impossible to drive in traffic. You'd need to follow a cam upgrade with other mods and finish with a performance chip for the best performance gains.

When pushing up the power you will need to uprate to the fuelling. More power needs more fuel.

If you find you have flat spots and power surges after your modified kits you should check the fuelling and try a higher octane fuel as well. Uprating the injectors is another beneficial modification and will deliver sufficient fuel.

If you are increasing your fuelling with bigger injectors you will also need to get a bigger fuel pump to supply it.

Intake and Exhaust Tuning.

The next area for modification is the intake and exhaust. Induction kits will only help to increase power if your air intake is restricted! Adding an induction kit to most stock engines will see NONE OF A LOW END POWER GAIN AT ALL. If you have heavily modified your engine and it's need for air INCREASES DRAMATICALLY then an induction kit is the answer and will help remove this restriction.

Maximum power gains come from a full induction kit with a cold air feed on heavily tuned engines, this can be sited within an air box but a performance panel filter should suffice for most applications. TorqueCars suggest you use a panel air filter as these are easy to clean and maintain and generally perform better than paper ones.

Do not go with the widest exhaust you can get this will slow up the exhaust flow rate - the best exhausts for power gains are usually between 1.5 to 2.5 inches. It is the shape and material more than the bore size.

gas flowing the head will allow you to maximise your air/fuel charge. Leave this to a professional though with a proper flow bench and machine tools When you tune up your XCeed you will reach a point that the standard clutch starts to slip so get an uprated clutch. The best mods we recommend for your XCeed are remaps, sports camshafts and induction improvements.

Remaps offer impressive power gains on all turbo charged cars. On NASP engines the benefits are doubtful. However a flashed ecu on a NASP engine will help unleash the potential if you have done a lot of mods.

We've also seen some tuners experimenting with twincharged conversions and making some seriously high power hikes.

The most impressive power gains for NASP engines usually involve the addition of forced induction. Superchargers are often easier to add than a turbo. It is harder to map a turbo as the boost increases exponentially with rpm.

It is more straightforward to map a supercharger because the boost is directly proportional to engine speed on a linear curve. To cope with forced induction you will usually need to decrease the engine compression ratio .

Handling/Suspension upgrades

Improving the handling for loads of people first priority in your XCeed tuning project.

Putting a tiny bit of negative camber to the front and a degree or two of toe out, will often improve your XCeed in handling and cornering.

Drop the car by as much as 29mm - 35 mm and fit uprated stiffer dampers, bigger drops will need other modifications in most instances.

Alloy wheel upgrades.

Alloy wheels will help the brakes cool down and are generally lighter than steel ones. We can't go into too much detail here about tyres but they are how the car puts the power down on the road so are a critical choice. directional tread pattern tyres work well on XCeed, and make a big difference over budget tyres. The drawback to large alloys on your XCeed is that you're changing your effective final drive ratio so this will have a negative effect on acceleration.

For this reason try to keep the overall rolling diameter of the wheel the OEM setup. In all cases without going larger than 17-18 inches, although we know some of our members have installed larger rims with no problems, we feel they ruin the fine ride of the XCeed.

There is a more updated version of this Kia XCeed Tuning article on TorqueCars.com.

For more information on Tuning your car please join us in our friendly forum where you can discuss XCeed options in more detail with our XCeed owners. It would also be worth reading our unbiased Kia tuning articles to get a full grasp of the benefits and drawbacks of each modification.

We need your help improving this article, so please send us your feedback in the comments box below and pass on any tips, points or facts we have wrong or have not covered.

We really do love seeing our visitors car projects and which mods work best for them, this site is very much a community effort, and we remind our visitors of our non profit non commercial approach to running this site.

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This article is flagged for an update, so please pass on specific tips below that I can include. All articles, and content was written by me, Waynne Smith TorqueCars founder. Some outlines are just too general so I appreciate your feedback and suggestions. This entry was filed under Kia. You can leave a response below or join our forum to discuss this article and car modification in detail with our members.

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