Thinking about buying a Kia so you can get one of those vaunted ten year/100,000 mile warranties? Save yourself a trip to the car lot. I can tell you from personal experience that the Kia warranty program is one of the utterly worthless and dishonest programs in the new car business; a business overloaded with dishonesty. In the first place, it isn’t a ten year/100,000 mile program, it’s a six year/60,000 mile program. If you want the extra four years and forty thousand miles be prepared to pony up another thousand bucks or so. And, no, that extra thousand bucks doesn’t buy you any extra added protection, although that is how it will be sold to you.
Be sure to read the text of the Kia warranty program closely. As near as I can tell, the only hazard it actually covers is if you run over a Dodo bird. The number of words it takes to explain what isn’t covered under the Kia warranty is roughly five times the number of words it takes to cover what is. That’s basically because the Kia warranty is a piece of crap that covers nothing for which you will really need it. We recently had a flat tire. Keep in mind that we ponied up for the extended tire warranty coverage. Turns out there was a nail in the tire. Covered by the warranty? I think not. It cost us over $300 for a new tire. And we were forced to buy the tire at Kia even though we could have got it for less than half the price elsewhere because part of the wonderful Kia warranty program stipulates that if you buy or have your tires serviced anywhere else other than Kia-even if you are on vacation somewhere-then your tire warranty is voided. The sales pitch for the Kia tire warranty is “free tires for life.” Unless, of course, you do something really out of the ordinary like run over a nail.
Last weekend we took the vehicle in for a tune-up. Now, the salesman-and I use that term loosely because what I really mean is the lying SOB who will burn in hell for eternity-told us that service like oil changes and tune-ups were free as part of the extended warranty we bought. I’m not making that up; that were his exact words, there was no wiggle room for misinterpretation. Guess how much they wanted to charge us for this “free” tune-up? Over $600! Now, I’m not big on cars, but frankly I’ve never heard of tune-up for anything other than a Maserati costing that much. We didn’t pay it. We brought out our warranty and were told that, essentially, we’d been lied to by the Kia salesman-I mean the Kia lying S.O.B who will burn in hell. Of course, since his paycheck has the word Kia written on it, I can only assume his bosses and their bosses knew he was lying through his teeth and that, in fact, lying to customers about the benefits of the Kia warranty is something that Kia trains it salespeople to do.
So, it is with no small amount of regret that I take this time to warn you that if you do go to buy a Kia, you will probably be lied to. And the warranty you buy will not be worth the time it takes to use it to wipe the feces off your anus.
