One of Kia’s strengths is value for money and this holds true with the Ceed when compared with fleet favourite the Ford Focus.

I pitted our long-term Ceed against the Focus 1.6 TDCi Titanium using the Fleet News car running costs tool (www.fleetnews.co.uk), provided by KeeResources on an operating cycle of four years/80,000 miles.

Overall, the Ceed works out more than 1 pence per mile (ppm) cheaper to run than the Focus, costing 31.56ppm compared with 32.85ppm.

That’s largely down to fuel costs. The Ceed has a combined fuel economy of 74.3mpg and its fuels costs are 8.68ppm while the Focus has an mpg of 67.3 and costs 9.58ppm in fuel.

The Ceed also costs marginally less to maintain at 3.15ppm compared with 3.83ppm. Where the Focus has the edge is residual value and depreciation, holding its value better than the Kia at £4,536 compared with £4,250.

Other key rivals in this sector outperform both the Ceed and the Focus on overall running costs, however.

The Honda Civic 1.6 i-DTEC ES-T and Skoda Octavia 1.6 TDI Elegance, for example, cost 30.7ppm and 31.27ppm respectively. One of the key differences is that the Civic and Octavia both have CO2 emissions below 100g/km.

The Civic emits 94g/km while the Octavia’s figure is 99g/km. In contrast, the Ceed emits 100g/km and the Focus emits 109g/km. The Civic also has the best mpg at 78.5.

Of course real-world mpg is a different matter. My colleague John Maslen achieved 60-plus in his Civic long-termer while I am in the 50s in the Ceed.