If mileage and maintenance cost are the only reasons you are holding back on the Kia, we would not worry about that too much. The Maruti brand has a general reputation and image of low maintenance. However, the Kia Seltos’s service costs are not very high, and the brand has a decent reputation for reliability.
We will be doing a detailed maintenance cost study in a few months, but it will be safe to say that the overall cost will be within the ballpark of the Grand Vitara. As for mileage, we have yet to test the new Kia Seltos, but it should be close (between 20% to 30%) of the Grand Vitara, which returned 11.6kpl in the city and 15.3kpl on the highway in our standard test cycle.