My 2012 Kia Sedona Suffers A Series Of Unfortunate Events

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– Posted on August 16, 2024

In early 1978, I was driving home from my after-school job at about 9 p.m. on a cold winter night in my 1967 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible.  As I cleared a traffic light, I looked down at my heater controls and looked back up just in time to see a much longer than usual line of cars stopped at the next light.  That was the last time I ran into the rear of a stopped car.  Until a few weeks ago.

I had no intention of a complete turnover of the JPC vehicle fleet when we replaced the Honda Fit with a new Dodge Charger GT this past May.  In fact, I was looking forward to several more years with Ma-Ma-Ma-My Sedona as my get-to-work “old car”.  Sadly, the Sedona was totaled by my insurance company and has graced our driveway for the last time.

I did not expect to bond with that van the way I did.  I bought it in September of 2011 because it was big, it was cheap and because it came with a really good warranty.  But a funny thing happened along the way – I really came to love it.  These feelings of fondness did not abate as it recently became my every-day ride.  From the first time I drove the Sedona to the last, I never lost the sense of awe I experienced as the engine and transmission worked together like the great team they were.  Pick your pairing – Astaire and Rogers, Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan, or even chocolate and peanut butter.  The Kia’s 3.5L V6 and its 6-speed automatic worked together with an elegance and complementarity that I have rarely experienced.

The other surprise was just how few problems I had with the car over thirteen years and 102,000 miles.  Beyond a handful of recalls (fewer of them than I experienced with my Honda Fit), I had only one significant warranty repair when one of the CV joints began making noise as the car approached the ten year mark.  Kia ended up replacing both axles and hubs due to an unfortunate tendency for the hubs to seize themselves onto the axle shafts.  I also had to replace both rear door handles, each of which broke once.

I was impressed by Kia’s brake components because I had both front and rear brakes done but a single time during the life of the vehicle.  Also, tires wore quite evenly so that I was just into my third set as of about five months ago.  And even at north of 100k miles, I never did anything else beyond normal maintenance and could still count on 18-20 mpg in my normal mixed city/highway driving.

I will confess that the older I have gotten, the heavier those middle-row seats have become when it became necessary to remove them for carrying cargo.  However, that was a rare enough occurrence that it was not a major factor in my life.  More of a factor was pulling down the heavy, manual liftgate when holding an armload of grocery bags.  I know, I know – if only I had spent a little more up front the liftgate would have been a pushbutton affair.  But when that is your biggest gripe with a vehicle after more than a dozen years, life is pretty good.

I didn’t know how long I had planned to keep the Sedona, but there was certainly no end-date on my horizon.  Ours displayed no rust, was clean and shiny inside and out and everything on it worked the way it was supposed to.  Until a split-second mistake put an end to all that. The car’s near-perfect record comes with, I should add, one glaring asterisk.

One of the Sedona’s recalls involved the possibility of an air bag sensor that would fail to trigger the bags in a collision.  It was a big enough deal that Kia provided us with a brand-new substitute Sedona for several weeks in 2018 before they were able to complete the recall.  I remembered this experience when it occurred to me that in the frontal collision which totaled the car, not a single air bag ignited.  I count myself fortunate that I was uninjured in the experience, and that this failure did not show up in a more serious accident than the one I had. I guess we count our blessings where we find them.  Had I been able to keep the car, you can bet I would have been in touch with the service people at Kia to ask just what happened here.  But whether fortunately or unfortunately, this question has become moot.

There have been plenty of cars over my lifetime that I would have jumped at the chance to convert into an insurance check.  With some of those cars, that would have been the best outcome imaginable.  Not with this one, though.  At least the insurance check was in an amount that I did not find unreasonable, being nearly 45% of purchase price when new.  My insurer, one of many gobbled up by Liberty Mutual in recent years, was much less reasonable in refusing to allow more than a $169 valuation increase from the $900+ set of Michelin tires I put on the car not six months ago.  Anyway, at the end of the process, it worked out to an ownership cost of under $1,000 per year in depreciation over our almost thirteen years with the car, a figure that is hard to beat when you start with a new car.

As unexpected as this turn of events was, I have found a replacement vehicle in a turn of events just as surprising.  But that is a story that will be told soon.  But for now I will close by saying so long, fair Sedona.  I am going to miss you.