Kia’s new, three cylinder, one-litre T-GDi (turbo gasoline direct injection) ‘Kappa’ engine will make its world production debut at the upcoming Geneva show.

The first car to benefit from the new engine will be the new cee’d GT Line range. In this application, Kia says the new Kappa engine will develop 120 ps and 172 Nm torque, and has been engineered to deliver lower CO2 emissions than the 1.6-litre GDi engine found in other cee’d models, pending homologation.

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After the cee’d GT Line, which goes on sale across Europe in Q4 2015, the new 1.0-litre T-GDi engine will be made available on a range of other Kia models in future, the company says.

Kia says the new engine is the first of Kia’s upcoming range of downsized engines to make its debut in Europe, and has been developed in-house by Kia’s powertrain development team at its Namyang, Korea R&D centre.

In developing the engine, Kia says its engineers focussed on highly-efficient combustion and access to maximum torque from low engine speeds. Throughout the T-GDi’s development, Kia’s R&D teams aimed for a 10-15% improvement in fuel efficiency compared to the brand’s current 1.6-litre GDi engine.

The new downsized engine feature a newly-developed laser-drilled injector, with six individual holes. Instead of consistently injecting the fuel-air mixture onto certain points within the combustion chamber, the laser-drilled holes, laid out in a pyramid shape, provide a more even spread of fuel and air throughout the cylinder, Kia claims.

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Backed by a high pressure pump, the new laser-drilled injectors are able to provide fuel injection pressure of up to 200 bar.

For more technical details of the efficiency gains, see full press release below