Complaint Review: North County Kia - Kia Motors - Hankook Tires

(Dear Editor: I am posting this message on ALL KIA related reports, for safety reasons. The NHTS gets real results.)

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administrationmission is to: Save lives, prevent injuries, reduce vehicle-related crashes.

I filed a report on my 2001 Kia Sportage (faulty vacum hoses/torn solenoid-due to poor design)--and they called me back THE SAME DAY!! They are going to investigate the situation. This is not the first time that NHTS has gone after KIA-read the reports!! They slammed down on them for their cheaply made 4 wheel drive hubs (to name just one of the many junk parts that Kia makes).

Be sure to have all your service documents handy. Express how unsafe you feel driving a KIA. And please; if you have had a problem with the vacume hoses/solenoid--PLEASE FILE A REPORT!! Kia does not fix this under their crappy 10 year plan!!

Just type National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into any search engine-and put Kia in their place!

Some points I agree with you, others I don't. How they can give a 100,000 warranty on a KIA POS is beyond me. How many people will actually keep the car for the 100k, will do all the scheduled maintanence and fight with the dealer to live up to the warranty, remains to be seen. Tires are another matter. Car companies usually put the cheapest tires they can find on new cars. Every new car I've bought has had a seperate warranty in the glove box just for the tires. It's spelled out in black and white what is covered and what isn't and says you have to go to a representative of the tire MFG for anything. Check your glove box. Same thing for other items of "wear and tear". Such as brakes and windshield wipers.

I you choose to Believe that tire rotation will not increase your tread life than you will continue being upset. You can put the most expensive tire on you car and have them wear out in under 15,000 miles if you dont follow basic tire maintence and upkeep. tire inflation, regular rotations, smooth acceleration and braking and having your alignment checked every 6 months will help ensure you get the max out of your tires.

Dont blame Kia or Hankook tire ....a informed car owner is the cars best friend

Hi Bryan,

One thing you may have overlooked is that there are several kinds of tire warranty. Some cover manufacturing defects and some provide proportional replacement discounts if tires wear out before a stated mileage.

Original equipment tires normally come with only a defect warranty from the tire manufacturer, not the automaker.

Since original tires on most cars along with batteries, brake pads and other consumables aren't well covered by warranty, mfrs tend to use the cheapest items they can purchase.

An owner then needs to upgrade to good quality as I did with my Toyota.

It's a shame, you can't option for better tires on most cars, but the factories just don't want to be bothered.

Good luck with your Kia, and do remember to rotate your new tires for optimum wear.

The Eagles on my Chrysler were onion skins at 17K miles. Two Chrysler dealers and two independent shops went throught the front end looking for any sort of irregularity in the geometry and found nothing wrong. This means the tires were junk. I should have spent the extra $$ when I bought it new and had Michelins swapped over, but I didn't and drove off with the Goodyears. The Goodyear dealer went on and on about rotating them, etc. Fooey. Rotating them does NOT make them last longer, it just makes them wear evenly. My front tires wore perfectly even...just did it in 17K miles. This means that instead of buying two tires every so often, you buy four. Even the tire dealers have posters confirming this. Nowhere do their brochures or posters say that rotating will result in less wear on all four tires. They offered to sell me more tires, but when I asked them to put into writing that all four tires will last longer and get more mileage overall, the deal was sunk. As you have surmised, not rotating will wear out the fronts while the rear just trail along behind on a front wheel drive vehicle. I average about 30K miles on the front tires of each of my Chryslers and over 100K on the rears. This means that I have saved the purchase of at least four tires for every 120K miles driven. Tire stores do not want you to know this. I also tell my customers this when they want their tires rotated. I will rotate them, but at least they are informed of the reality of the service. The mark-up on tires is huge. I buy them wholesale and add $10/per. I wind up selling them for 2/3 of what the big chains sell them for, so you can see what kind of money they are raking in by selling you the extra tires that you wouldn't have needed if not for rotating them. Add to this huge profit margin, the money you will pay to have them rotated, and guess what? You just spent enough money to buy even more tires. What a racket. Spend your money wisely. Buy the best tire you can. Do NOT waste any more money rotating them, and expect to get about 3/5 of the advertised mileage. When you hit the 100K mile mark on your rears, swap them to the front so they will start wearing out. They won't last forever anyway. You will come out way ahead in the money you will save. At 120K miles on my Concorde LXI, I just installed my 2nd set of replacement tires on the rear, and my 3rd set on the front. That sure beats buying 3 complete sets all the way around.

Have now had new tires for almost 1 year with 12,000 miles on them. Absolutely no wear. New tires are Yokahama 60K tires. Old were Hankook 50K tires. Hankook wore out after 12K miles and refused to honor warranty (cleaver worded warranty - no milage listed in it, only on their website).

Talked to several KIA owners and ALL have had same experience (as well as brakes wearing out at 20K miles - and yes, mine are wearing out too).. Also talked to several tire dealerships - same conclusion: I was lucky to get even 12K miles out of the "cheap Kia tires" (as one tire place put it).

My experience agrees with Bob. The Kia warranty totally excludes the tires. So you have no beef with Kia here. All the tire warranties I've seen require the tires to be rotated or the warranty is no good.

The tires that come with new cars are generally the cheapest the manufacturer can find. What buyer is going to choose one car over another because it comes with better tires? Maybe for sports cars, good tires would be a selling point. Sports car owners are used to spending a lot on tires anyway.

On all the front wheel drive cars I've had, the front tires wear out a lot faster. The rear ones hardly wear at all. Also there are sometimes dynamic factors that will wear a tire unevenly (making it not round) if it stays in one place too long. Once a tire becomes out of round it will never give a smooth ride. For these reasons it is necessary to rotate the tires to distribute wear among all four. Also the rotation allows inspection for abnormal wear which would indicate a problem with the wheel aligment.

It is not complicated to rotate tires yourself, but this will not preserve the warranty. For the basic "all weather" tires on a small car, the cost of professional rotation is high enough that it would quickly exceed the possible cost of replacing the tires prematurely. In other words, it would cost more to get the tires rotated, follow the warranty and make a claim than it would to ignore the warranty and pay for new tires yourself if they wear out early.

They do the same thing for example with the engine. In order to preserve the warranty, the oil has to be changed at a "professional dealer", and strict records kept. If you can't produce every receipt for every oil change since the car was new, they will deny a claim for engine failure. Even if the problem wasn't oil-related, for example one reporter here had a timing belt fail at 45,000 miles, and the warranty was denied because he couldn't prove all the oil changes.

Warranties these days are just so many words to reassure the consumer and make the sale. They are not an expression of goodwill by the company to make problems with their products right. Never pay more for a warranty, which will inevitably prove useless if there is a problem. And don't let the warranty promises be a major factor in your buying decision.

As a former service station manager and customer relations specialist for Mobil Corp, I'd like to offer some advice to the person who filed this report.

First, front wheel drive cars put much more wear on the front tires than the rears since almost all braking effort as well as movment and cornering occurs on the front axle.

If you don't rotate the tires about every 6,000 miles, your fronts will last much less than your rears. This is normal with front wheel drive, and 7,500 is a rather long rotation interval and will help even out the wear.

Now, there's a point to consider here. Most vehicles do not come with high quality tires. If you must pay $20 each time you rotate, it's a tossup.

I just ditched the OEM junk on my 2003 Toyota Corolla at 12,000 miles for a good set of Michelin Harmonys which I will rotate every 6,000 miles.

Tire warrantees are normally from the tire mfr and do require regular rotations. If this isn't done, the wear adjustment policy won't apply. Most tire mfrs don't even offer wear adjustments on tires installed as original equipment by the car mfr.

Your dealer isn't being unfair to you at all. That's just how tires wear on front wheel drive cars. If you want even wear between front and rear, you need to rotate regularly.

Good luck, and give your Michelin dealer a call if you need tires.

By the way, I work for the federal gov't and have no stake in Michelin.

In leau of Steve's "rebuttal", IN should add the following:

1) The KIA mechanics said that there was nothing wrong with te car mechanically. There was noting indicating abnormal wear.

2) The rear tires look as good as they did when the car was purchased
3) This car is a commuter; 20 minutes of city driving a day - that is about it... which leads to:
4) our other car, also a KIA (a Sportage) has never had it's tires rotated, has more milage then the Sephia, and has new looking tires...

5) I used to be in a business where I drove over 10,000 miles a month and have NEVER had tires wear out like this... ever... Not on a new Honda, not on a new Mitsubishi truck, not on a used Toyota, not on a used Honda, not on an Oldsmobile... Never...

6) Yes, I was enticed by the 10 year warranty, and low price... Next time, We are going to stick with Honda - never, ever had abnormal tire wear on either Accord we ever bought...

conclusion: cheap, bad tires.

I hate to sound negative Bryan however it sounds like your trying to get something for free. If your tires wore out at 12,000 miles I would suspect they wore out from abuse i.e. hitting curbs, hard braking, spinning tires or out of alignment. The 10/120 warranty is for mechanical not glass, trim, tires or paint.

On the other hand if you can prove the tread fell off then you would have a valid claim. My recommendation to you is to get your credit card out buy new tires take better care of your car.