How about Hyundais?
My wife and I are starting the process of shopping for a new car, and I am getting some conflicting information about Kias and Hyundais. It seems like we can get a whole lot more car for the money, particularly if we buy a car that is a couple of years old, if we go the Korean car route, but when I talked to my local mechanic about this his strongly advised against it. He said that they don’t hold up well in the long term, and that because of the way they are put together maintenance on them is more expensive and more frequent than on a comparable Toyota or Honda. That we would particularly regret our choice if we got a car with 35k or 40k miles on it because it is around the 60k mark that things start to fall apart. But then I look at online reviews and lists and see that they are all rated highly as good value cars and wonder if my mechanic is working with out of date information because he just doesn’t see a lot of these cars come into his shop, particularly not newer ones.
So, I am turning to the SDMB for a second opinion. We are thinking about something like a 2010 Kia Sorento, or a Hyundai Santa Fe (maybe the mini van options, though I don’t know if we have resigned ourselves to being mini van people yet.). What do the car people over here think? I am very much not a car guy and we are looking to get a car that will last us at least a couple hundred thousand miles like the Toyota Corolla we are replacing has but I am worried that paying less now will cost us down the line.
Kias have only stopped being garbage in the last model year or so (at least with what we know so far.) Look at Consumer Reports and Kias are mostly littered with black dots up until this latest generation.
Hyundai seems to have gotten their shit together a couple years sooner. but even Hyundai was junk up until say '06-'07.
It just plain baffles me how they’ve managed to pull off such a turnaround in perception in such a short time.
I have no opinion either way on Kias, but if, as the OP proposed, Kias tend to fall apart after 60k miles or so, wouldn’t it be reasonable to conclude that might be the reason why reviews of Kias are only decent in the last year or so? Since no Kias 1-2 years old have driven 60k miles yet?
well, my way of thinking is that Hyundai seems to have gotten things together (though their long-term durability remains to be seen) and Kia is effectively part of Hyundai so they share platforms and tech, so I’m guessing Kia should track Hyundai pretty well.
Great little car, I use it for commuting (about 95 miles per day, mostly highway). Average about 38 mpg.
Automatic transmission failed at 157,000 miles. However, since the rest of the car was in great condition, took a chance on getting it repaired for $2,400. Now at 190,000 miles and feel it was worth it.
Only other problems have been the power windows and the ignition switch, and regular maintenance such as timing belts. All in all not too bad for 190,000 miles and 11 years. I’ve had Fords that were about the same and a Pontiac which was much worse.
Mercedes’ fall apart after 60k miles but nobody describes those as “junk.”
Kia, and to a lesser extent Hyundai, spent many years making junk at junk costs and selling it for junk prices. It’s my opinion that their reliability issues had less to do with engineering deficiencies, and more to do with the fact that they were building cars that were a generation or so behind on technology, and building them to a price point.
Fast forward to today (where Hyundai owns Kia), and they’re both making cars that are on par with the engineering standards for a worldwide automaker such as Toyota or VW. They can still tend to be a little unpolished, but their reliability is arguably better than VWs and their products are arguably better than Toyotas. I have no problem recommending either brand on merit (instead of price).
Full disclosure - I have an '06 Sedona with 83,000 miles on it that’s cost me nothing to operate beyond basic maintenance. I got it for a song because it was slightly used and because there’s a Kia badge on the front of it. In other words, it was nearly as good as the used Hondas we were looking at but was about $7,000 less. That said, the '06 was a complete redesign over the '05, which was an overweight pig that wouldn’t have been competitive if they had come out with it in 1995. The '06 was a dramatic improvement. And they’ve repeated that pattern with several of their cars.
We just bought a Sonata. I talked to our mechanics before we did and one said some of the older Hyundais were not so great, but in recent years, they’re much better. The other said he’d buy a Hyundai if he was in the market right now.
We’re very happy with our car and we intend for it to last a long time. It will get regular maintenance like our other vehicles and barring a tree falling on it, I fully expect it to go for at least 200K miles, if we live that long.
If you buy a new one they have 10 year 100k mile powertrain and 5 year 60k mile bumper to bumper warranties.
Note that if you are a subsequent owner the powertrain warranty reverts to 5 year 60k.
GM sold 1 million Chevy Citations the year it came out and it was Motortrend car of the year or some such. VW has never made a reliable car ever, and yet they are the largest carmaker in the world. New car buyers don’t care about reliability, for the most part. and for a new car it’s largely unknowable anyway. It’s all in the design, features and performance.
I haven’t bought any of Bob Lutz’s books but that’s what he’s always going on about.
The local Mercury dealer had just started stocking the first Hyundais in 1998. I was there for a used car sale and the salesman suggested that I look at the new Accents. I laughed at him, literally. He shrugged and suggested at least a test drive. Long story short I bought my first Hyundai (Accent) in 98, drove it until 2005 without any problems (90,000) Although I did, much to my reluctance, replace the timing belt after 4 years due to what I perceived as dealer scare tactics. Traded that one in for a 2005 Elantra that I am still driving today without any problems. I’m pretty militant about oil changes and other regular maintenance though. I am highly satisfied.
I had an 02 Accent before it was tragically destroyed in a tornado (really). Great little car, and super easy to park in the city. In addition to its many other meritorious features, like beats-hybrids mpgs, reliability, etc, it also, through the miracle of unstupid design, could hold more cargo in the hatchback than a Ford Escape SUV.
I had a Kia Rio that made it over 100K. It did have loose brake lining (or something) at around 60K but that was still in warranty. I only traded it in because the clutch was going (never been replaced, and to be expected at 100K) and I wanted a car with air conditioning (In Florida! I was the guy who bought the come-on clown car that the dealers buy so they can advertise cars for under $10K :))
Now I have a Kia Spectra that shows no signs of dying, cross fingers, at 100K. It’s never required warranty maintenance work, just the standard maintenance schedule and, recently, new brakes.
Considering that cars have become much more reliable over the past 20 years, I can’t say they’re literally the best-made cars, but when you calculate their reliability versus their cost, they’re definitely worth the money.
Here in New Zealand Hyundai have run a long series of ads playing up how devoted they are to improving quality and reliability. One ad shows the flash resort all the engineers stay at, another shows how they pull motors off the line and run at the redline for days on end, yet another shows the steel mill they built so they could be sure they’d get steel of the quality they required and so on. All very slick and seemingly effective at getting their message across.
So my guess is they’ve made changing this perception the core of the marketing plan and spent huge amounts of money getting that message out there.
My cousin was a mechanic at a Kia dealer for a few years. He’s worked at a lot of different kinds of shops and knows a lot of different kinds of cars. He didn’t hesitate to recommend a 2009 Sportage to his mom.
Could have been that with whatever employee discount he had it was too good of a deal to pass up, but he’s not the kind of guy who is going to recommend a car to his mom that he would have to be fixing all the time.
I’ve got a Y reg (2001) Kia Shuma that I’ve had for over 8 years, and it’s done me sterling service. It’s never required an expensive repair apart from when I broke the rear shock absorbers (£300), and the fanbelt replacement service. I rather suspect, though, that this year will be the end of the road for it.
Maintenance-wise it’s supposed to go for a sevice every 9K miles, but don’t do that many miles so I just send it in once a year.
Until very recently Kias have always been basic but functional. They’ve not sold widely in the U.K. and were not well known. A friend of mine was scathing when I bought my Kia, but he ended up buying two for his daughters.
That said, you require a car capable of doing a high mileage and I don’t know how well the Kias fare there.
If Hyundai and Kia didn’t make reliable cars, they wouldn’t offer such long warranties.
The warranty tells you what the automaker itself believes the reliability of the car is. When I bought a Hyundai two months ago the standard warranty was 5 years, 100,000 KM bumper to bumper. Had I bought a GM automobile, it’s 3 years, 60K, though there’s a maze of supporting warranties on specific components depending on the model. That is a simple reflection of the fact that Hyundai believes its cars are relatively reliable up to 100,000 KM and GM does not believe their cars are equally as relaible past 60,000 KM. There’s no other rational explanation for it, unless you believe GM is giving up that marketing advantage for no good reason or Hyundai wants to do a lot of free repairs, or that one or both companies know less about their cars than you do.
I’ve also, to be perfectly honest, never met a person who bought a Hyundai or a Kia in the last ten years who didn’t like it. That’s anecdotal, of course, but it’s a remarkably persistent phenomenon. Absolutely every single person I ever speak to about their car who own a Hyundai product notes how trustworthy they are. I think that, to be honest, has as much to do with their reputation as any ad. I don’t trust ads, nor do many people, and if a company ran a series of ads stressing the car’s reliability I’d probably believe the opposite. But when every single person who owns a Hyundai/Kia says somethng to the effect of “Man, I bought that sumbitch and put 170,000 miles on it and so far the worst thing to happen to it is the headlight burned out” it does start to have an effect. By comparison, I hear more complaints about GM products than I can begin to recount.
As to the quality of the two cars, Kias are okay. They feel cheap; they work fine, but they feel… well, like Hyundais felt ten years ago.
Or maybe it’s just cheaper to sell you a shitty car right now and fix it later than it is to make a good one from the beginning. You’re making a baseless assumption about the cost structure of a car company which is a hugely complicated affair. Hyundais have always had better warranties than their competitors even back when everyone knew they were crap. Mitsubishi and Suzuki offer warranties similar to Hyundai’s right now, you think it’s because Mitsubishis are also more reliable than everyone else? Chevy’s powertrain warranty is longer than Toyota or Honda’s, that’s because Chevys are more reliable than Toyotas or Hondas, right?
Just another personal anecdote, But I have a six year old Kia Sorrento we bought new, it’s at 135,000kms now (sorry not sure on the miles conversion there). We’ve been very happy with it.
The only real issue we’ve had with it is a crappy quality radio/CD. We had it replaced twice in the first six months (all under warranty) and since coming out of warranty, the CD player has crapped itself, and there’s a loose wire in there somewhere now. At the time Kia was only offering three year warranties on the Sorrento.
That’s really quite minor IMO, the fundamentals of the car have been fine. We have just recently had two minor issues we had to have repaired, a crack in a coolant hose line, and some worn gaskets in the engine block had to be replaced, both pretty minor and these were the first things we had to actually get repaired outside of normal service items.
Prior to that I had a Hyundai Excel (not sure what the name for that was in the States - it was the model prior to the Accent, small three door model). I bought that back in 2000 or so, had for 5 years, only ran it up to 80,000kms though, But that was a fantastic little car. It was a manual so no auto complications to worry about. But never missed a beat in the time I owned it. The only minor quibble I had was the rear bumper, where the paint went all crappy after 4 years or so.
Personally, I wold have no hesitation in buying a Kia or a Hyundai when I replace the Sorrento in the next year or so.