I hit a deer on my way to work this morning. The front of my car is pretty fucked up but it didn’t deploy the airbags so I think it’s repairable.
My rant isn’t with the deer. Well, ok, it is with the deer. Fuck that little asshole for deciding to commit suicide with my car. My rant is with Kia engineers for thinking they know more than the people operating their vehicles (which, admittedly, may be the case for some/many people).
My car is a '23 Soul, FWIW.
So I hit the deer, pull over, call my wife who comes and picks me up and after some running around, switching vehicles, and picking up my son so he can help get my car home, I’m left driving my other son’s F-150. My son and I go to U-Haul and try to rent a car trailer. No dice – they’re all reserved. But a car dolly is available. Great! I rent the car dolly and drive out to the boonies where my car is patiently waiting by the side of the road. We load up my car, strap it down, and…
And this is when I learn that my car’s electronic parking brake cannot be disengaged unless 1) the ignition is on and 2) the transmission is in gear but 3) only for a few seconds. It cannot be disengaged with the ignition off or in Accessory mode. Only with ignition in the run position. It cannot be disengaged with the transmission in neutral (what the everloving fuck??). If I turn on the ignition but do not start the car and then put the transmission in neutral and release the parking brake, approximately 93 alarms, bells, chimes, and buzzers start going off and then after 10 seconds or so the brake re-engages itself. Kia has engineered the car so I cannot disengage the parking brake unless the car is moving, in gear, using it’s own power.
There is simply no way to to tow it using a car dolly. It has to be trailered.
To say I was livid would be an understatement. Dammit Kia, what possible reason exists to make you design the parking brake system this way? Did it not occur to you that there may be situations where someone needs to move their car when it’s not feasible, practical, or possible to use the vehicle’s own engine and transmission? What if it suffered engine failure at some inopportune moment and needed to be pushed to the side of the road? Kias are know for this, you know.
Since I have Gorilla tape, honest-to-God bailing wire, and zip ties in my car my son and I poke around the front of the car and decide we can remove the falling off bits of bodywork and zip tie / tape / wire the rest back and try to limp home, my son following in the pickup in case my car dies or fully falls apart. That’s when my son discovers he forgot his driver’s license. So we take the pickup and go back to U-Haul, drop off the tow dolly we didn’t use, go home and get his license, go back to my car, and I slowly and gingerly drive it the ~20 miles home with my son carefully following in the pickup.
This day sucks.