Not sure if Hyundai & Kia are quite as reliable, but if not it's on them because they have some of the best warranties in the industry.
The days of their collaboration with Ford are long gone, and with it their body durability problems. They still collaborate with Toyota though.
Also had an issue with the backup camera cutting out. Was caused by a loose connector. Dealership was unwilling to help for free so I just cleaned the contacts and reseated the connector myself. Months later I received a recall notice with no fix available, still more months later hey finally said there was a repair but I haven’t brought it in yet.
All that said I’m still happy with the car despite these imperfections and will keep driving it until the wheels fall off, and wouldn’t have any reservations about buying a new one.
In my country used car dealers will not touch Mazda diesels for trade-ins because they always come back to them with destroyed engines.
However, as it applies to the parent comment, I can't actually say too much about reliability, as both of them were driven primarily on weekends and _maybe_ 2K miles per year.
Was a Hybrid, though that shouldn't affect this. It wouldn't save most of the settings I changed. Apparently you can either save it "to the key" (I googled how to do it, didn't work) or to your "profile" with a mobile app. I would never want to have to use my mobile to save car settings, even if I owned it, let alone a rental.
It has a feature that scans road signs and displays them on the dash. Awesome feature, which I've had in other cars before. Just in case you missed one and usually more accurate than Google maps for dynamic situations like construction zones. Unfortunately it loudly beeps and blinks at you if you happen to go over the limit or god forbid set the cruise control above the limit. This can be disabled individually but is part of the settings that don't save across car shutdowns.
Why is that an issue? Because setting the cruise control to 50 when in a 50km/h zone will have you driving 45 in reality as evidenced by speed measuring displays I drove by. At 100km/h you'll probably be going 90. I learned the 6 key presses on the steering wheel to disable this after starting the car real fast. Unfortunately it disables the entire feature (else it'd be a lot more key presses and I ain't doing that). If this wasn't a rental but a purchase I'd be in this guys boat and trying to return the car.
This is just one example. The other more dire one is the cruise control. I've mentioned it elsewhere before and this Corolla isn't the only one, but the automatic breaking in these cars nowadays is dangerous. The amount of time I was sitting in the car with my foot right above the accelerator in case I need to power through an automatic breaking situation was unreal.
So glad to have been back home after vacation, driving my Subaru (with an adaptive cruise control that does not have this issue).
This is very common and it's probably a deliberate choice of the manufacturer.
I know that my old car in the 90s reported 10 km/h more than the real speed and most other cars did the same, especially at low speeds. My current car is not as bad but I have to set 52 to go 50, 72 to go 70.
Furthermore some speed displays are calibrated differently. Some of them report me at 50, 47, 53 at different towns on the same route. I know I'm OK at 52 because I never got a fine.
I'm more conservative on roads that I'm not familiar with (eg: on a vacation in another country.) The general rule has always been to go at the same speed of the other cars.
Yeah I hate when that "just happens" too.
> or god forbid set the cruise control above the limit
The word limit is the key here.
> Because setting the cruise control to 50 when in a 50km/h zone will have you driving 45 in reality
Dear god! I hope you somehow made it through that insufferable experience. To think of the few seconds of your life you've irreplaceably lost! Sending a virtual hug!
It's also miserable to drive because of beeping, controls that cannot be seen by the driver, and a dozen other obvious problems.
Supposedly Hyundai fixes such stuff before release, but I wouldn't risk it.
It's never been back to the dealer except for a free oil change at ~1K miles. Mainly because the reputation of Kia dealers is that it's hard to say whether you will be in worse shape if they deny or accept your warrantied repair. I mean, if the engine fails, sure, they can't make it any worse. But there are many stories of people getting a recall and the coolant system not properly bled, so the car overheats on the way home. Or a dealer refusing an obvious warranty repair for ridiculous reasons - only to try to sell you a non-warranty repair for the same problem, etc.
I am driving my car as if there is no warranty, at this point. It's been a GREAT car to drive in most ways, but I don't expect Kia to come through and fix any drivetrain issue in the next few years / 55K miles, if needed.
I will probably go with Toyota for our next car despite loving the handling and comfort of our Subaru.
Great car otherwise. Well, the CVT isn't the best for driving. But the AWD and agility and snow handling is fantastic.
The CVT sort of sucks. Mostly ok but we have a long lag between reverse and drive which causes the car to jerk forward if you try to accelerate before the forward motion starts. The turning radius is amazing though.
My father in law is a Toyota mechanic and warned me to get rid of the car before 100k miles though as more recent subies are as reliable as they used to be.
I hope my current car makes it so that I can entirely skip the current gen cars to hopefully the future one with these issues sorted out, including physical buttons.
Kias EVs are even more famour for troubles, just google for Kia ICCU. Even the XC90 competitor EV9 seems to have some trouble with this still.
Outside of those issues, which don't happen on all vehicles, I view the brand as pretty rock solid. I'm impressed by how quickly they iterate, their styling, and their NVH attributes. Their pricing has crept up a bit, but still not terrible.
One local dealer refused to honor under warranty the work another dealer did.
If you have any damage (even minor cosmetic) they will blame that on your issues regardless of relativity.
(I have a Hyundai that's had the ICCU replaced once, the ABS IEB twice, and the low-voltage battery 3 times, two of the 3 times on my dime. All on a less than 3-year-old car with less than 100k miles)
The company has been miserable to deal with compared to my past experiences with other brands.
(And according to forum threads, at the time this happened to this us, stealerships were putting people on a 1-2 year waitlist for remanufactured engines, or straight-up totalling their vehicles and giving them "market value" for the car, and these models had awful resale value exactly due to these problems.)
That said, a few months ago my daughter was t-boned in it by a driving going 60+ MPH. The impact was directly on the driver’s door. She not only survived, but did so with only superficial facial cuts and some longer-term, back pain.
I can’t be too hard on a car that saved my daughter’s life.
Brand average reliability is tricky though, on their 100-point scale, their top manufacturer (Subaru) has models that range from 38-98.
Looking at the model breakdown... I kinda suspect they don’t really have enough datapoints - VW’s reliability only includes 3 models (the Tiguan, ID.4 and TAOS) - Ford has a 25-point difference between the Escape and Maverick hybrids that share the same engine/powertrain (I can’t think of any reason why the Maverick would actually be notably more reliable than the Escape unless the PHEV escape is dragging down weighted reliability by that much over the mild hybrid), etc.
In-group std is greater than between-group std.
To a USAian, “European Brand” means something from Germany or Scandinavia. If you mean a Ferrari or Lamborghini, you say that name.
VWAG owns the largest Spanish car maker, Seat/Cupra. 100% of cars Seat/Cupra sells are VW derivatives. Whatever you imagine the difference between Spanish cars and German cars to be, it is not real.
>French/Italian
Renault is a very different company then Stellantis (Fiat, Citroen, Peugeot).
What you should compare is the parent company making these cars.
>Plus you have some luxury British cars, which are again veery different.
Lotus is a Geely brand, just like Volvo is a Geely brand, some of their cars are on the same platform. Fiat, Citroen, Peugeot are Stellantis brands.
The only spanish car maker is SEAT and it's part of VAG group. SEAT are more expensive than Skoda, but cheaper than Audi.
And using the country card with these automaker corporations is very tricky, because they have factories everywhere. You can buy an Audi made in Spain or a VW made in Slovakia.
Outside that, they are cheap cars, and mine after 10 years have some paint chips even peeling.
