Driving Dystopia: Kia Partners With Disney On Themed Infotainment Screens

Kia has announced that it will be partnering with Disney to offer customizable infotainment screens, featuring the “beloved characters from the studio’s most iconic entertainment brands.” Depending upon your personal preferences and (let’s be honest) gender, this corporate collaboration could either be wonderful news or one of the sadder things you’ve learned this week.

The automaker is claiming that it will offer five Disney franchises by the end of the year, with a grand total of thirty by the end of 2026. Availability will be determined by whether or not your Kia is modern enough to use the Connected Car Navigation Cockpit (ccNC) infotainment system. In this country, that likely means select models built after 2023. But ccNC is eventually supposed to become the default user interface for all vehicles manufactured by the Hyundai Motor Group.

Properties will include Disney’s mainline franchises (e.g. Lion King or Mickey Mouse), Pixar properties (e.g. Toy Story), Marvel Studios characters (e.g. The Avengers), and everything Star Wars. The release also made mention that National Geographic themes will become available — just in case you happen to have mentally progressed beyond the age of twelve.

With at least thirty individual themes being planned by the end of next year, it sounds like all the big franchises and classic characters will eventually become available. Themes look to be quite comprehensive, changing not only the background but also app icons, startup displays, and color options.

Officially, I need to say that everyone is entitled to customize their automobile in whatever manner they deem correct. There’s nothing inherently wrong with selectable interior displays. However, some of the meanest things I’ve ever said about cars were also tied to corporate partnerships yielding themed appearance packages — mainly because they’re often overt cash grabs offering the purchaser nothing of tangible value.

Kia’s latest effort similarly showcases how the industry is trying its best to turn cars into tablets with wheels. This is part of the overarching push toward “software-defined vehicles” and away from traditional automobiles. Screens are now cheaper to implement than buttons and offer the possibility of novel revenue streams, especially if you lock customization behind a paywall.

Despite decades of people being able to customize the background displays on their computers and phones for free, the same will not be true of your car unless you’re willing to jailbreak the system and void your warranty. The automaker will be making the downloadable themes purchasable via the Kia Connect Store.

Pricing has yet to be announced. But other in-car themes tend to retail somewhere between $20 and $40 (USD) apiece. We imagine Disney’s displays will probably retail on the higher end of the spectrum upon their initial release.

This is obviously something your author wouldn't purchase in a million years. But I think this will actually work out extremely well for Kia. There’s a meaningful subset of the population that’s interested in defining themselves by their respective fandoms. Not only do they believe that it makes up a large part of who they are as a person, they’re also often keen to display their loyalty via clothing and décor. This is particularly true of Disney properties.

While plenty of us are going to mock these customization options as overtly trashy and debatably pointless, there will be loads of people that will learn about Kia’s Disney display themes and have it be the deciding factor on which car model they’ll buy next. Automakers know this and that’s one reason they’ve been focusing so heavily on touchscreens and connectivity features.

On the more premium end of the spectrum, we’ve seen Mercedes-Benz doing everything in its power to make its interiors resemble a cheap night club and charging quite a bit for the privilege. While all current Mercedes models offer some amount of customizable ambient lighting, the really bonkers stuff tends to be limited to the brand's priciest models.

But even the absolute worst cabin configurations of the modern Mercedes-Benz S-Class (below) undoubtedly has an army of ardent fans. Now that automakers have figured out how to properly monetize it, customizable gaudiness has become mainstream. However, it always was to some extent.

Kia is simply leveraging its own digital customization by targeting a different audience (specifically Disney Adults). It’s still wildly tacky, arguably more so. But people will absolutely buy into this, whether it’s being done to appease their children or themselves.

Considering that Hyundai Motor Group (which includes Kia) has endured successive, large-scale user data breaches over the last three years, we’d argue the company has bigger fish to fry than offering themed displays featuring Disney characters. But solving that problem first would be costly, presumably temporary, and the potential for fresh revenue via new downloadable content was undoubtedly too great for the business to ignore.

“This collaboration with Disney represents a ground-breaking use of our digital and over-the-air [systems] to allow owners to customize not just the appearance, but the personality of their vehicles with the art of characters from some of the most beloved cinematic worlds ever created,” stated Charles Ryu, Senior Vice President and Head of Kia’s Global Brand & CX Division. “Kia aims to establish itself as the industry’s most approachable mobility brand both through its innovative product design and the advanced use of smart technology.”

[Images: Kia; Mercedes-Benz]

Become a TTAC insider. Get the latest news, features, TTAC takes, and everything else that gets to the truth about cars first by  subscribing to our newsletter.