SsangYong Is Now KGM: What That Means When You Order Parts

What actually happened to the company

The short version is a change of owner followed by a change of name. SsangYong Motor filed for court receivership in South Korea in December 2020, after Mahindra, which had held it since 2011, stopped funding it and could not find a buyer. A consortium led by KG Group won court approval in June 2022 to take a controlling stake, and the company came out of receivership later that year.

The name went in March 2023, when shareholders approved the change to KG Mobility. In the UK, Europe and most export markets the shorter form KGM is what ended up on the cars and on the dealer signs, which is why three versions of one company name are now in circulation at once: SsangYong, KG Mobility and KGM. All three refer to the same organisation, and a customer who uses one of them is not telling you anything about their car.

Nothing merged and no engineering went anywhere else. The plant, the nameplates and the numbering all stayed put; only the label moved, and that is why it causes trouble at a counter. A workshop that was buying SsangYong parts before the change is buying the same parts from the same factory data today, through a catalog that now has a different word on the front of it.

Each market switched on its own date

This is the part worth having straight before you end up arguing with a customer about it. The rename did not land everywhere on the same day, and in some markets it landed in two stages.

SsangYong Motors UK became KGM Motors UK on 21 December 2023, with immediate effect, and the existing SsangYong dealers were rebranded under the new name. The UK site still leads with the line Previously SsangYong at the top of the page more than two years later, because plenty of buyers still search the old word. Australia took longer and went through a middle stage, trading as KGM SsangYong with the winged logo retained, before moving to KGM Australia from 1 June 2025.

So two cars built in the same month can wear different badges depending on where each one was sold, and a customer's sense of what they own depends on when their local importer changed its stationery. The badge records a date in a marketing calendar. The VIN records what was built.

The dates that come up most often at a counter:

What did not change, which is nearly everything you use

The VIN is the anchor and it was never renamed. Seventeen characters, the same structure as before, resolving to the same build data. Whatever word sits on the tailgate, a VIN from a car built before March 2023 and a VIN from one built after it are read the same way and answer the same question, which is what this specific vehicle actually is.

The part number format also carries across both names. In our own OEM format reference the KGM and SsangYong family is a single entry, because there is one convention behind both badges: ten digits, commonly written with a hyphen after the fifth, in the style of 48230-34000. That is the same five-plus-five split Mobis uses on Hyundai and Kia, though Mobis numbers carry a letter in the second block (58101-2W000) where these stay all digits. If you want the Korean number anatomy in full, our Mobis EPC guide already walks through it.

That single fact settles most of the anxiety this topic generates. A workshop that already reads Korean part numbers has nothing new to learn here, and a number that does not fit the shape is a problem with the number rather than a symptom of the rename. It is worth saying out loud to a nervous customer, because the assumption behind most of these phone calls is that a renamed company means a renumbered parts range.

The nameplates mostly carried over

Tivoli, Korando, Rexton and Musso all carried across the rename and were sold as KGMs after March 2023, which is the main reason this rename is survivable at a counter. A customer says Rexton, you look up Rexton, and the fact that the company is now called KG Mobility never enters the conversation.

The Korando is the exception worth knowing about. It has dropped out of the current ranges in the UK and Australia, so an owner may well hold a KGM Korando their local importer no longer sells. That changes nothing about the parts data, but it does change the conversation, because a model missing from the brochure makes an owner assume it is missing from the catalog too. It is not, and the factory data reaches back through the SsangYong years for exactly this reason.

Torres is the one that cuts both ways. It launched in Korea in July 2022 as the SsangYong Torres, months before the name change, so early cars carry the old badge, while in the UK it only ever arrived as a KGM. An advisor who has never seen the word may not recognise it at all.

Checking the UK line-up on 28 August 2026 shows Tivoli, Torres Hybrid, Torres EVX, Actyon Hybrid, Rexton, Rexton Commercial, Musso, Musso EV and Musso Rhino sold side by side: nine variants across five nameplates, which is a wider spread than most counters expect. Australia runs a similar set built on the same words, which is a useful reminder that the model name gets you close and the VIN gets you the rest of the way.

The two Actyons are the real trap

Actyon is the collision most likely to produce a wrong order, because the word has been used twice on unrelated vehicles. SsangYong sold an Actyon from 2005, a compact SUV, alongside an Actyon Sports pickup derived from it. The name then went out of use for years, long enough that a whole generation of parts advisors never handled one.

KG Mobility brought it back in 2024 on a new car sharing its platform with the Torres, longer and lower than the Torres and sold as a coupe-styled SUV. It reached the UK as the Actyon Hybrid and is in the current Australian range as well. There is no continuity between the two cars beyond the letters. An experienced advisor who hears Actyon and pictures a mid-2000s SsangYong is picturing a vehicle with no relationship to the one in the bay, and an advisor who only knows the new one will read a 2007 job card the same way in reverse.

This is exactly the case the VIN exists for, because the model name is genuinely ambiguous and the seventeen characters are not. Resolve the VIN, read the build the catalog returns, and let the diagram tell you which Actyon you are quoting. Asking the customer what year the car is helps, but a VIN settles it without the customer needing to be right about anything.

The same caution applies to any enquiry that arrives as a model name and a rough year, which is most of them by phone. On this manufacturer the model name has been reused and the company name has changed underneath it. The VIN has stayed fixed since the car left the line, which is why it is the thing to ask for.

The Mahindra years do not send you to an Indian catalog

A Korando from the Mahindra years was built while an Indian company owned SsangYong, and that trips up people who have met the Indian product range. Ownership of a company and the source of its parts data are separate questions, and treating them as one costs a morning.

Those cars were built in Korea and sold as SsangYongs, with Korean part numbers, and they belong in the SsangYong data along with everything either side of them. Nothing in that period moved the identification of these vehicles anywhere else, and nothing in the KG Group period has moved it since. The ownership column changed twice while the parts column stayed still.

Read the ownership history as background rather than as a routing instruction. The car in the bay tells you where to look, and it does that through the VIN.

When the paperwork and the catalog disagree

This is the actual job, and it takes about thirty seconds once you have decided how you are going to handle it.

Take the VIN off the vehicle rather than off the job card or the last invoice, because either may have been typed mid-rename by somebody half paying attention. Then resolve that VIN in the manufacturer catalog and work from the build it returns. The name at the top of the screen stops mattering at that point, because the parts list underneath it is describing this specific car.

Worked through, it looks like this. A customer books a Musso in and brings a registration document that says SsangYong Musso, plus a service book and a recent invoice from a dealer now trading as KGM. You read the seventeen characters off the car itself. You enter them in SsangYong (KGM) EPC and let it resolve the build, which comes back as one specific model year and specification whichever name the customer's documents happen to use. You open the diagram for the corner you are working on, take the genuine number off it, and check the shape before you go any further: strip the hyphen, count ten digits. Only then do you look back at the customer's paperwork, and you look at it for one purpose, which is deciding what name to type on the estimate.

That last step is where it matters. If the registration document says SsangYong, write SsangYong on the estimate, put the genuine part number next to it, and let the number carry the weight. Quoting a KGM Musso to somebody whose logbook says SsangYong Musso invites a phone call you do not need, and the same is true in reverse for a recent buyer who has never seen the old word. The number is the thing both of you can check against the car; the name is the thing that keeps the conversation calm.

Two vocabularies inside your own systems

The rename shows up worst in the systems around the catalog rather than in the catalog itself. Stock records, aftermarket cross-reference data, salvage listings and supplier portals were indexed under SsangYong for decades, and plenty of them have not caught up. A KGM search that returns nothing is usually an old index.

Search both words as a habit, and where your system allows it, add the second name as an alias against the first so the next person does not have to remember. A dismantler feels this hardest, because a stock list built over ten years sits almost entirely under the old name while incoming enquiries increasingly arrive under the new one. Two names against one record solves it permanently, and it solves it for everybody who touches the record afterwards.

Body shops get a variant of the same problem from the other direction. Estimating systems and insurer records may carry either name for the same vehicle, and where a facelift changed a grille or a badge those trim items are build-specific. Match them from the diagram and the number rather than from the model name on the estimate, because a badge is one of the few parts on the car where the rename genuinely does change what you order.

The same discipline applies to anything you file for the future. A job card written today under whichever name happened to be on the screen becomes the record somebody copies from in three years, which is how one mistyped name outlives the rename that caused it. Writing the genuine part number on the card is what makes that record survive the ambiguity, and it costs nothing at the time.

What the catalog itself gives you

Our entry is held as SsangYong (KGM) EPC, it runs on the KGM Portal, and it lists both SsangYong and KGM as covered brands, so neither search term is a dead end. It is browser-based, you enter a VIN and get the exact build, and access is a $5 day pass, $50/month or $500/year across all 53 catalogs. The full coverage and feature detail sits on the catalog page linked below, and VIN decoding on this site is free whether or not you go further.