2024 KIA SORENTO Complaints

Kia has failed to provide proper protection for their radiator on their Sorento and Telluride models. There are many many many reports online of these radiators sustaining damage which should not have occurred, and Kia refuses to cover any of these repairs under any type of warranty. In my example, my brand new 2024 Sorento with 1,300 miles overheated and dumped all of its coolant due to what the Kia dealership claimed was a puncture in the radiator. The vehicle was never driven off road, and had never been hit by anything. If Kia has a guard in place to prevent this from happening, the guard is insufficient and should be a concern. Kia refused to cover this issue under their warranty.

All dashboard lights turned on and were orange during two separate instances. During both instances I went to brake and nothing happened. Eventually the brake finally engaged. On one of the instances the brakes took ~5 seconds to re-engage while coming to a traffic light stop. There were two pedestrians that I almost hit before they re-engaged.

What component or system failed or malfunctioned, and is it available for inspection upon request? The car suddenly shutoff How was your safety or the safety of others put at risk? I was doing a U-TURN when the vehicle turned off. It took about a minute for the car to turn on and I was left in the middle of the road. Has the problem been reproduced or confirmed by a dealer or independent service center? Not yet. Has the vehicle or component been inspected by the manufacturer, police, insurance representatives or others? Not Yet Were there any warning lamps, messages or other symptoms of the problem prior to the failure, and when did they first appear? None

We purchased the car around Thanksgiving of last year (2023). A month and a half after purchase, we noticed all the warning lights coming on all at once. When we reported the incident and safety concern with the Kia dealership, they claimed it would be okay and we had nothing to worry about until our service appointment in Mid-March. Today, my wife was driving with my mom in the car and the brakes completely failed while they were driving on a major highway. Fortunately they were able to pull the car into an embankment before going down a large hill into the valley. We had the vehicle towed back to the Kia dealership where they’re running tests and diagnostics to identify the issue. We’ve also opened a case with customer affairs at Kia of America.

We parked our vehicle and turned it off to go get dessert. Upon returning after 15 minutes, I pushed the "start/stop" button with my foot on the brake, and the car powered on but for some reason it thought it was in D. The car refused to start and kept showing a message to put the car into P. However, the P button wasn't responding when pushed, and no matter which direction I turned the shift dial, the car would not change from D. Pushing the P button did not change the status. We tried turning the car off by pushing the "start/stop" button, but it would not turn off and instead entered the accessory ON mode and kept showing a message to put the car in P in order for it to turn off. Our car would not turn off nor would it start. It was stuck in accessory ON mode. We did a Google search of our issue and discovered that this situation has happened to other HEV Kia Sorentos. It is through this search that we were able to try a quick solution of essentially doing a "hard reset" on the car by unplugging the main battery and plugging it back in. Thankfully, this worked so we could travel back home. However, access to rear battery was challenging because the rear hatch would not open while the car was in D. It required crawling to the back and adjusting the 3rd row to gain access to the battery. This strikes me as a computer system failure. It is not something consumers can fix on their own. Failure of this system strands drivers at their location of failure. We were lucky it happened in a parking lot but it could happen anywhere a person chooses to put their car into P. In addition, having the car stuck in accessory mode would eventually drain the energy out of the battery. At this point, the car would not operate. Prior to this incident, the car was operating fine. No symptoms or warnings. In fact, we had just finished lunch about 20 minutes before and had no problems turning the car on/off when parked. We have not had the car inspected as it just happened Saturday.