Kia Trail'ster Teases E-AWD With A Trad Twist

Kia keeps dripping out details of its new rugged concept car, now dubbed the Kia Trail'ster, though if anything we're even more confused than we were before. What started last month as the teasing bumper and chunky wheels of a concept for the Chicago Auto Show now has a name – replete with needless apostrophe – and what turns out to be not quite the electric all-wheel-drive powertrain we were expecting. Instead, it appears that the Trail'ster will be a hybrid, combining old and new technologies to make it more sure-footed in snow and mud.

According to Kia today, the car is both "turbocharged" and uses a "rear electric all-wheel drive system" which, from the sound of it, would mean the front wheels are powered by a regular gas engine while the back goes electric.

That's a different approach to what we'd thought Kia might do, based on the initial description of an e-AWD powertrain. That implied a strategy similar to what Tesla did with the AWD "D" variants of the Model S, throwing more electric motors into the mixture and boosting traction, power, and – surprisingly, perhaps – range in the process.

In using a gas engine you do at least bypass the range limits of electric-only drive – the Kia Soul EV we drove last October manages around 93 miles on a charge – which could be a more pressing concern if you're in the middle of the wilderness as a "city-dweller-turned- outdoor-adventurer" the company suggests will be the Trail'ster's target audience.

Exact specifications of the gas engine part of the system – if, indeed, that's how Kia plays the concept – are yet to be revealed. Elsewhere, the only other detail we know for sure is that there's a fully retractable canvas roof.

Kia keeps referring to the Trail'ster as a concept, but we'd be mightily surprised if the company didn't have some sort of production intent in mind for it.