Kia builds one PV5. WRD imagined five.
The PV5 is Kia's first true Platform Beyond Vehicle. It's the company's bet that the next era of mobility will be defined by purpose-built shapes on a dedicated electric architecture. As a product, it works. As a question, it opens something larger: what does a vehicle this versatile actually mean?
That's the question Project712 was built to answer. The ongoing virtual tuning series from WRD° uses the PV5 as a canvas to explore how one purpose-built vehicle can speak in different cultural languages.
Project712's first chapter answered that question through Korean retro commercial graphics. Liveries lifted from Lotte Confectionery, Coca-Cola, GoldStar, the 1988 Olympics Besta EV. Visual archaeology, paint and decals on a stock shape, deliberately confined to the skin. Link
This second chapter goes further. Five new PV5 concepts, each one modified in hardware as well as livery. Bumpers, ride heights, roof racks, solar roofs, wide-body fenders, GT diffusers. And the cultural lens shifts from Korean nostalgia to global references. A Tokyo taxi. An American action hero. A beach nomad. A Korean rally service van. The fastest van Kia hasn't built yet.
WRD WORLD bridges deep automotive knowledge with creative storytelling, working across the nuances of design and engineering, mobility and motorsport.
The MK Taxi
The first concept doesn't need to be imagined. It's already happening.
At the 2025 New York International Auto Show, Kia revealed the PV5 WAV, an ADA-compliant electric wheelchair-accessible taxi developed with BraunAbility. Kia's PBV business head Sangdae Kim framed it as part of the company's broader U.S. WAV strategy. The PV5 wasn't reimagined as a taxi. It was launched as one.
So the question for WRD wasn't whether a PV5 could be a taxi. It was what kind of taxi, and where.
We chose Japan. Specifically, MK Taxi.
If you have spent any time in Kyoto, you have seen them: black sedans and Alphards, drivers in white gloves, the yellow heart glowing on the rooftop sign. MK has become shorthand for meticulous, almost ceremonial taxi service, praised in international media and favored by high‑profile visitors to the city.
What most overseas passengers never learn is who built it. MK Taxi was founded by a Japanese citizen of Korean descent, known in Korean as Yoo Bong‑shik (유봉식), who merged small Kyoto operators in the postwar years and turned the result into one of the most progressive players in Japan’s tightly regulated taxi industry.
The Korean connection did not end with the founder, either. In the early 2000s, MK and Hyundai began working together to put Hyundai sedans such as the Grandeur XG into service in Japan, under a partnership that envisioned several thousand cars joining the fleet.
The partnership entered a second chapter in 2022. Hyundai re-entered the Japanese market that February with EVs only, online only. Five months later, in July, MK Taxi placed an order for 50 IONIQ 5 Lounge units, becoming Hyundai's first major fleet customer of the second era.
A Korean-founded Japanese institution has been buying Korean cars for over two decades.
WRD's PV5 MK Taxi isn't a hypothetical. It's the next car in a relationship that has been running since 1961, working together since 2001.
The A-Team Van
In 1983, NBC introduced a black-and-gray van that aired weekly for the next four years. The GMC Vandura belonged to The A-Team. Two-tone paint, a red sweep stripe running hood to tail, red turbine mag wheels, a rooftop spoiler, a tall whip antenna. B.A. Baracus drove it, played by Mr. T. The show reached forty million American viewers at its peak and ran in continuous rotation across the UK, in Germany as Das A-Team, in Spain as El Equipo A, in France, in Japan as 特攻野郎Aチーム, and in Korea as A-특공대.
Fans called the van the fifth team member. They weren't wrong. Until then, the hero cars in popular culture had been sports cars. Bond's DB5. The Bullitt Mustang. KITT. The DeLorean. The Vandura was the first time a full-size cargo van carried the same narrative weight. After it, vans became a category of their own.
WRD's A-Team PV5 is a near screen-accurate reconstruction. Black main body with metallic gray accents, the red diagonal stripe lifted exactly from the original, red mag-style wheels on BFGoodrich Radial T/A tires, rooftop spoiler, front bull bar, roof and grille auxiliary lights, the antenna, and California plate S967238, the same prop number used on screen. The only deliberate anachronism is the current KN logo on the door. Video
The Vandura proved a van could carry the same cultural weight as an Aston Martin. The PV5 asks whether an electric van can do it again. Not as a replacement. As a continuation, on a platform built for the next era.
The Hippie Van, Reformed
In 1950, a Dutch Volkswagen importer named Ben Pon sketched a box on wheels. He had no idea he was drawing the vehicle of the next twenty years' counterculture. The Type 2 became the bus that carried the Merry Pranksters across America. It carried the Grateful Dead, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan. It became the Mystery Machine. At Woodstock, the parking lot was full of them. Roger White at the Smithsonian put it plainly: people who rejected mainstream America chose the Type 2 because it said, "We don't need your big V8 cars."
In Korean, the philosophy behind that choice has a name: 무소유 (musoyu), non-possession, the title of a 1976 essay by the monk Beopjeong. Don't take more than you need. Pack, drive, move on.
The contradiction was that the Type 2 itself was a polluter. Air-cooled flat-four, no catalytic converter. The drivers who bought into the philosophy in 1969 are in their seventies now, and many became the first generation of EV adopters and renewables advocates. The belief never changed. The technology finally caught up to it.
WRD's PV5 Beach is the vehicle those drivers would actually want today. Off-white body with a sunset-stripe graphic in yellow, orange, and red across the lower flank. Pop-up roof with an integrated solar panel that generates power while parked. White steel rally wheels with off-road tires. A beach chair, a folding table, and a branded surfboard that references Kia's real partnership with The Ocean Cleanup, signed in 2022. The non-profit has removed over a million pounds of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The hippie van was anti-establishment. The PV5 Nomad is post-disposable.
The Forgotten Rally Service
There's a chapter of Korean motorsport history that even Korea has half-forgotten. In January 1993, Kia entered the Paris-Dakar Rally with the Sportage. Through the mid-1990s, Kia campaigned the Sephia in FIA-sanctioned international rallies, including rounds in Australia and Indonesia, under Kia Motorsport Korea. The livery was clean: white body, bold red diagonal sweep, the old Kia oval logo, Korean Air as title sponsor, Michelin tires.
Most automotive enthusiasts outside Korea have never seen these cars. The fact that they existed at all is something the company itself rarely brings up.
A factory rally team is never just the race car. It's a convoy. Service vans, parts trucks, recovery vehicles, all wearing matching livery. Peugeot, Mitsubishi, Porsche, and Subaru all ran factory service vehicles in factory colors. The Dakar T4.3 class for service trucks has existed since 1998.
WRD's PV5 Dakar Service makes the unsung half of the team the main subject. White body with the red diagonal sweep lifted from Kia's 1990s rally cars. The retro Kia oval logo, not the current KN wordmark. Race number 65. Lifted ride height, white Compomotive rally wheels on Michelin Pilot Sport tires, a roof rack carrying spare wheels and jerry cans, CATL battery branding on the rear, the same Korean Air decal the Sephia carried in 1995, a two-axle flatbed trailer behind it.
The retro oval logo is deliberate. It dates the team visually to the mid-1990s. This isn't a 2026 program. It's a 1996 program running EVs three decades early.
The SuperPBV
Kia builds GT versions of almost everything in its EV lineup. EV6 GT. EV9 GT. EV4 GT. The car that doesn't have one is the PV5.
When Kia revealed the EV6 family in 2021, the brand produced an ad that put the EV6 GT on a drag strip against five supercars: a Lamborghini Urus, Mercedes-AMG GT, McLaren 570S, Porsche 911 Targa 4, and Ferrari California T. With 430 kW and 740 Nm of torque, the EV6 GT led the pack out of the line and lost only to the McLaren by one car length. The ad set the tone for an entire sub-brand.
The PV5 sits on E-GMP.S, Kia's PBV-specific electric platform. The motors that make the EV6 GT fast come from the same Hyundai Motor Group component library. Nothing about the platform stops it.
The genre is also real. Ford built the first Supervan in 1971 on a modified GT40 chassis. Supervan 3, in 1994, ran the same Cosworth V8 that powered Ayrton Senna's McLaren MP4/8 F1 car. The current electric Supervan 4.2 makes roughly 2,000 horsepower and won the Goodwood Festival of Speed Hillclimb two years running. Renault built the Espace F1 in 1995 with the V10 from Alain Prost's championship-winning Williams-Renault FW15C.
WRD's PV5 GT pulls its livery directly from that original EV6 GT drag-race ad. Silver and grey base, neon green and black graphics, diagonal slash patterns, race-number decals, lowered ride height, wide-body fenders, carbon-look diffuser, neon green calipers. License plate reads PV5 GT.
The name on the door is ours. Supervan belongs to Ford, so we coined a different one. SuperPBV. Because the PV5 is a PBV first, and a fast PBV is a SuperPBV.
The fastest vans in history have always been promotional vehicles, built to prove what manufacturers could do if they wanted to. Kia hasn't built one yet. WRD imagined it for them.
Five Chapters, One Vehicle
Five concepts. One vehicle. Five cultural arguments, each one drawn from something that already exists. A Korean-founded Japanese taxi company. An American action drama from 1983. A 1960s counterculture and the technology that finally caught up to it. A Korean rally program from the 1990s that almost no one remembers. A genre of fast vans that has been alive for over fifty years.
The PV5 doesn't have to be all of these. But it can be any of them. That's what a Purpose Built Vehicle actually means. Not a vehicle built for one purpose. A vehicle built for whatever purpose you bring to it.
Kia made the vehicle. Project712 made it speak.
Jinsoo Park is an automotive content strategist and founder of WRD WORLD, a Seoul-based creative agency specializing in automotive culture and brand storytelling.
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