In the recent CBC article linked below, the owner of a brand-new 2024 Kia Sportage used his car for just five days before it went out of service in May. One of the parts ordered to fix it won’t arrive until next September.
Among the brands whose vehicle owners are more likely to be stranded while waiting for parts, Kia, Jeep, Dodge, Ram, Hyundai, Toyota and VW electric vehicles are the ones that come up more frequently. Vehicles can be off the road for weeks or months waiting for backordered parts while their owners and lessees continue to make payments. The public would benefit from more robust consumer protection. In Canada, only Quebec defines a “lemon,” and empowers the buyer to ask the seller and manufacturer to take the vehicle back if they are unable to correct a significant defect, or unable to provide a courtesy loaner, after 30 days off the road.
The parts on order in the case of the Sportage are a wiring harness and the Powertrain Control Module; their combined value is several thousand dollars and suggests that the dealership may not yet have identified the specific cause of the malfunction and is replacing whatever they can get approval for on warranty. The APA is seeing more cases like this because of the increasing complexity of vehicles and rapid expansion of electronics; it’s a challenge for dealerships to keep up with the new tech from the factory when there are bugs.
Kia offering to replace the vehicle after a call from the CBC is unusual. The story does not state clearly if the offer will be at no charge – that would be an excellent outcome, which would be a surprise to other stranded vehicle owners. No doubt, it’s at least partly thanks to media attention.