Faults:

Of course, nothing yet. It's still new

General Comments:

I am still pleasantly surprised about this car. I was persuaded to test drive a Kia by a friend who owns one, and decided to buy it instead of the Lexus RX 450h I was looking at. The Kia was brand new, the Lexus was 8 years old, so I finally went with the Kia. In New Zealand, Kia give a 5 year warranty, with 3 years free roadside assist, and 3 years free servicing, which was another reason for my choice.

The diesel engine is powerful enough, and with 440 Nm of torque, it's a pleasure to drive on the open road. Even with the engine still being new and tight, I get less than 7.5 litres per 100 km (about 37 MPG), pretty good for a heavy all-wheel drive car.

Inside, it has heated seats, electric seats, Bluetooth, USB connections, satnav, as well as side airbags, blind spot alarms, parking assist alarms, reversing camera, the list goes on. The third row of seats can fit a 6ft adult, but kids would fit in there easily. With the seats down, there's a huge amount of room.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this car.

Faults:

Fan speed control at the 3rd row seat has not been working since new.

This issue developed into a problem where the main fan speed (for the 1st and 2nd rows) can be triggered to run at full speed randomly, and the only option is to switch it off.

General Comments:

Since it’s under warranty, the car has been brought back to the dealer to fix over 5 times now since we purchased it brand new.

Each time they took the car for several days, but each time they found some other parts broken or a wiring issue.

Parts had to be shipped from Korea, which took 2 to 4 weeks to arrive in Australia. But the last issue found was bent wiring loom connection pins. A loom needed to be custom made brand new from Korea, and it took 10 weeks to come.

Worse was it rendered 1st and 2nd row air conditioning unstable and unusable at times. This is because the fan speed can be triggered to run at full speed randomly. You can turn it off, but when you try to switch it on again, it's still full speed and there's nothing much you can do about it except switch it off.

Before the Sorento, we owned a Santa Fe, also from brand new and serviced with the same local dealer, without any issue for 6 years.

We picked the Santa Fe or Sorento because we are a family of 5 with 3 young kids, and use all 7 seats fairly often. Therefore, third row air conditioning outlets as well as independent control was one of our selection criteria. There were not many options like this and within our budget during the times when we had to make the purchase decision.

So when we decided to change car, I thought a Sorento would give us a similar ownership experience to Santa Fe. However, it turns out this air conditioning issue created so many disruptions in the past 12 months, as if my 3 young kids didn’t throw us enough troubles to deal with every day.

To be fair, there is no other issue found so far. The car is spacious, practical and drives great, especially on the open road. Fuel usage also falls within our expectations.