Born Under OccupationIn December 1944, a machinist named Kim Cheol-ho opened a small steel tubing and bicycle-parts shop in Yeongdeungpo, on the outskirts of Seoul. Korea was still under Japanese colonial rule at the time, so the colonial government registered the company under its own transliteration, Keijo Seimitsu Kogyo. Kim's Korean name for it was Kyungsung Precision Industry, a company that we would later know under its newer name: Kia. When it started, it made the kind of unglamorous, but necessary parts to get people mobile: bicycle chains, hubs, cranks, pedals, and the steel tube stock that other shops bent and welded into complete frames.It wasn't exactly glamorous, but it was strategic. Kim's own founding remarks framed the company as a small piece of a much bigger project. Industrializing Korea's machine-making capability was the only real path out of poverty and toward genuine independence. Bicycles were the test case. In a country with almost no domestic industry to speak of, something as basic as a chain or a hub still had to be imported, and Kim's shop was betting it could make that stop being true.KiaKorea's First BicycleJapan withdrew in August 1945, and Kyungsung Precision spent the back half of the decade doing exactly what Kim had promised: building out Korea's own supply of bicycle parts instead of importing them. By 1949, the company was exporting bicycle saddles to Hong Kong, a small, but real foreign-currency win for a country that had almost none. But while Kia was on the precipice of growth, another conflict would derail its progress, as the Korean War erupted in June 1950.In the first year of the war, control of territory, including the capital, Seoul rapidly changed between North Korean troops backed by the Chinese and Soviets and United Nations and American forces. In January 1951, during the mass evacuation south known as the January 4th Retreat, Kim loaded up what equipment he could save and relocated his entire operation to Busan, the temporary wartime capital on Korea's southeastern tip. There, the bicycle-parts shop kept functioning; effectively as refugees escaping a city under siege.KiaIt was out of that Busan factory, still mid-war, that Kim's company hit its first real milestone. In April 1952 it rolled out the Samchully, which it sold under the model name 3000-Liho, which was the first complete, mass-produced bicycle ever built in Korea. Up to that point, anyone who wanted a bicycle in Korea was riding an import. The name itself was a small piece of nation-building propaganda in its own right. "Samcheon-ri," or 3,000 ri, was an old shorthand for the length of the entire Korean peninsula, north to south. Calling the bike the "3000-Liho" was a promise, or maybe a dare: this bicycle could carry you the length of the country.That same month, with a domestic product finally on the market, Kim renamed the company Kia Industries, a name built from the Sino-Korean characters ki ("to arise") and a (short for Asia), meant to read as "rising out of Asia." It's the same badge you'll find on a Sportage or a Telluride today, but in 1952 it was stamped onto bicycle frames rolling out of a wartime factory in Busan.KiaThe Honda YearsThe Korean war ended with the armistice in 1953, and Kia spent the rest of the 1950s scaling up beyond the Samchully; aiming to prove that South Korea could build its own mobility instead of importing it. A larger bicycle plant went up in Gyeonggi Province to meet postwar demand, and in 1957 Kia took its first step onto anything with a motor: a licensing agreement with Honda to build motorcycles domestically. Kia didn't have the engineering base to design an engine of its own yet, and it didn't pretend to. What it had was a manufacturing operation that already knew how to mass-produce two-wheeled vehicles at scale, and Honda supplied the powertrain know-how to go with it.It's worth sitting with how significant that arrangement actually was, as this was a partnership with none other than Honda. Kia decided to partner with a Japanese company; a country that had occupied the Korean Peninsula for thirty-five years before 1945, whose wounds haven't healed much to this day. Licensing Honda technology was as much a pragmatic bet as a political one; Kia needed capability it didn't have and a former colonizer's motorcycle maker happened to be one of the few regional players positioned to supply it. The motorcycle line also gave Kia something more valuable than the bikes themselves: a real engineering apprenticeship. Building someone else's design under license didn't mean that one was just assembling motorcycles from a kit; Kia was getting a course about engine tolerances, how a transmission is machined, and how a factory floor has to be organized to build a powered vehicle instead of a pedal-driven one. None of that knowledge existed inside Kia in 1956, and by the time the Honda deal wound down, it did. Equipped with this knowledge, the company leaned on a few years later when it moved from two motorized wheels to three.KiaThe Mazda YearsIn 1962, Kia landed a licensing deal with Mazda to build mini-trucks. These materialized as small three-wheeled pickups that Kia eventually sold in South Korea as the K-360 and the later T-600. In Korea, these vehicles earned the nickname 'sambari,' or "three-footed vehicle," and it became something close to a national workhorse. It was a true working-class hero; a truck that was cheap, simple to maintain, and perfectly suited to a country that still had more dirt roads than paved ones. Over the truck's production run, Kia moved more than 25,000 of them, and it earned a reputation as the truck of the people during a stretch when Korea's economy was still finding its footing.The trikes wasn't without its problems. Rising accident rates eventually led the government to ban the three-wheeler from highways in 1972, which led Kia to discontinue it a few years later. But the little truck's legacy outlasted its production run by decades. In 2008, South Korea's Cultural Heritage Administration designated a surviving T-600 as a Registered Cultural Property, officially recognizing it as a piece of the country's industrial history rather than just an old delivery truck.KiaThe Mazda partnership was initially made under the country's Automobile Industry Promotion Plan, a government program modeled on Japan's own export-driven industrial playbook. However, Kia deepened its relationship with Mazda in the early 1970s into a full technology-transfer agreement, building a modern assembly plant in Sohari to support it. The result was the Brisa, a small sedan and pickup launched in 1973 and 1974, respectively. Built on the architecture of the Mazda Familia, it was Kia's first real passenger car built with pieces built in Korea. In conjunction with the launch, Kia began manufacturing its own 1-liter gasoline engines domestically and by end of the Brisa's first production year, roughly 65 percent of its parts, including the engine, drive shaft, and clutch, were sourced from inside South Korea. Like its former three-wheel creations, the Kia Brisa was also a cultural icon. The Brisa was a common sight on the streets of Seoul through the 1970s and early 1980s as passenger cars and taxi cabs. The Kia-Mazda arrangement eventually came to an end in 1981, when Korea's new military government under Chun Doo-hwan forced an industry consolidation that pushed Kia out of passenger cars entirely and back into trucks, a detour that lasted until Kia partnered with Ford in the mid-1980s to build the Pride.The Bicycle Business Didn't DisappearEven after Kia moved on to motorcycles, three-wheelers, and eventually cars, it never actually walked away from the bicycle business that built it. The Samchully line kept rolling under the Kia Industries umbrella for another quarter century, and it kept hitting milestones of its own. It exported South Korea's first bicycle exports to the United States in 1965, and by the 1970s, annual export volumes climbed into the hundreds of thousands of units a year, driven in part by the national push of the country's early manufacturers into export engines.By then the math had changed. Kia's future was clearly in cars and trucks, not chains and cranks. In 1979 the company spun the whole bicycle division off as its own standalone business: Samchully Bicycle Co. The split became final in 1985, when Samchully cut its remaining ties to Kia Industries entirely. It's still in business today, still making bikes as a separate company now, but one that shares a birth certificate with the automaker that outgrew it.Bloomberg / Getty ImagesKia couldn't be any different these daysKia's own road wasn't nearly as smooth as Samchully's. The company spent the back half of the twentieth century building out the passenger-car lineup the Brisa had started, but the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit its balance sheet hard enough to force it into court receivership that October. After a bidding war that reportedly drew interest from Ford, GM, and Samsung, Hyundai Motor won a government-supervised auction in 1998 and took a 51 percent controlling stake, folding Kia into what's now the Hyundai Motor Group. Hyundai's stake has since settled in the mid-30-percent range, with Kia still trading as its own public company rather than a wholly owned subsidiary.These troubles make it hard to perceive that Kia built itself up in a country with almost no industrial base. It's founder who thought a chain and a set of pedals were a legitimate first step toward national independence, and later spent two decades licensing engines and truck platforms from firms based in the same country Korea had only recently been liberated from. It's bike business may be completely separate these days, but what came out of it was nothing other than revolutionary. After eighty years it began making the first bicycles, Mr. Kim's little bike shop has evolved into an automaker with some of the most advanced and visually stunning cars on the road.