Presenting the Upcoming Ford Sorento…

Alright, stop yer squawking. Different people see different things in a vehicle’s styling and it all amounts to a pile of nothing, but it’s hard to look at these leaked shots of the 2021 Kia Sorento and not think about the folks in Dearborn.

Photos posted by Instagram user onecar.1 appear to show the next-generation Sorento in its native South Korean habitat, enjoying a dreary rainy day with its protective wrap uncovered.

Up front, the midsizer sports Kia’s signature Tiger Nose grille, this one filled with mesh resembling chain links, which blends outward into triple-cell LED headlamps. It gives off a whiff of Explorer, in this author’s opinion.

Out back, twin rectangular taillamps stand upright on either side of the liftgate, bringing to mind cut-down Mustang housings (or that of an early-’80s Mercury Cougar coupe). None of this is to say the upcoming Sorento doesn’t improve in the looks department. With the arrival of the top-flight Telluride, Kia’s big-crossover design has taken a turn for the burly, and that’s not a bad thing. The Sorento looks to continue that design drift.

Inside, we can see a wide dashtop touchscreen that the industry can’t seem to do without, joined by a digital screen in place of a traditional gauge layout. This is almost certainly an uplevel feature reserved for the most well-monied of Sorento buyers.

A post shared by Onecar (@onecar.1) on Jan 28, 2020 at 11:11am PST

What we can’t see in these shots is anything aft of the front seats, so it isn’t known whether the Sorento will return to the lineup as a two-row-only model, one with an optional third row, or keep the same recipe as before. For 2019, Kia made third-row seats standard, but the arrival of the Telluride may have changed Kia’s strategy.

The model’s Korean debut isn’t far off, so stay tuned on that.

[Images: Instagram]