Well, these are two pretty similar cars we have here! It's only details that could potentially make the difference. Considering they both belong to the small family car segment and utilize the same 5-door hatchback body style and the front wheel drive system, it all comes up to the specific diesel engine choice they offer. The first one has a Hyundai-engineered powertrain under the hood, a 4-cylinder, 16-valves 115hp unit, while the other one gets its power and torque from a 3-cylinder, 12-valves 82hp engine designed by VM Motori.

The fact that the KIA got tested by the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), while the other contender didn't, isn't really an advantage, taken the poor 3-star rating it received. That aside, let's consider some other aspects which affect safety. Both vehicles belong to the small family car segment, which is generally classifying them somewhere in the middle safety-wise, but that fact doesn't break the tie between the two cars. Furthermore, taking kerb weight as an important factor into account, Cerato offers a marginal difference of 7% more metal.

I don't like generalizing things when it comes to reliability, although it does seem that Hyundai does have a slight advantage, at least on all of the models level. These are the official statistics, while our visitors describe reliability of KIA with an average rating of 4.6, and models under the Hyundai badge with 4.5 out of 5. Some independent research have also placed Cerato as average reliability-wise, and Accent is more or less at the same level.We should definitely mention that owners of cars with the same powertrain as Cerato rank it on average as 4.8, while the one under the competitor's bonnet gets 2.3 out of 5.

There's not enough data for me to elaborate on the subject, I'm affraid.

KIA is apparently more reliable, not too much, but just enough. The most important thing when deciding between any two vehicles should always be safety, both passive and active. In my opinion, everything taken into account, Cerato offers much better overall protection, which launches it ahead of the other contender. When it comes to performance, both vehicles provide similar experience, so I wouldn't point any of them out. Fuel consumption is more or less the same. All together, there's not much more to say, in this case I wouldn't even consider anything but KIA. In any case that's my personal view, built upon all the data available to me. What should decide here though is the way you feel about the two vehicles, and I hope you'll find my guidelines useful in the process. In case you have two minutes to spare I invite you to define your needs, desires and budget and see which car would be chosen by the virtual adviser™, out of 12.000+ vehicles we currently have in our database.