Kia has issued a voluntary recall of 410,619 vehicles that include Kia Soul, Kia Sedona, Kia Soul EV, and the Kia Forte. The reason for the recall is a defect with the airbag unit that may result in airbags not deploying in an event of a crash. The non-deployment of the airbags makes this passive safety feature redundant and could increase the risk of injury in an event of a crash. Coming to the affected vehicle, the first one on the list is the Kia Soul of 2017-2019 make and manufactured between July 25, 2016 to December 24, 2018. The second one is the Kia Sedona of 2017-2019 make and manufactured between December 7. 2016 to January 10, 2019. The third vehicle on the list is the 2017-019 make Kia Soul EV that has been manufactured between May 18, 2017 to September 28, 2018.
The fourth vehicle included in the recall is the Kia Forte of 2017-208 make manufactured between March 2, 2017 and July 27, 2018. The fifth and last vehicle on this list is the 2017 Kia Forte Koup manufactured on October 4, 2016. As for the numbers of the affected vehicles there are 253,281 affected Kia Soul, 47,690 affected Kia Sedona, 953 Kia Soul EV, 108,693 affected Kia Forte, and 2 affected Kia Forte Koup. That said, all the 2020 Kia Soul and models after that and the 2019 Kia Forte and models after that are free from this issue. While the Kia Soul EV was discontinued in the U.S. by 2020 and the Forte Koup was discontinued in 2017. Coming back to the issue itself, in the NHTSA report it is stated that the Airbag Control Unit (ACU) cover due to some manufacturing defect would come in contact with the Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) chip on the ACU’s Printed Circuit Board (PCB) may occur which damages the soldering on the EEPROM.
This throws an error code B1620 in the vehicle diagnostics and the Airbag Warning Light will light up. Thus indicating the malfunctioning of the airbags. For fixing the issue Kia will notify the affected vehicle owners by March 21, 2022. The vehicle owners will be required to bring the vehicle to Kia dealers and the issue will be checked. If the vehicle is found to be affected then a different PCB with a different EEPROM will be installed. While those affected customers will be compensated by Kia Motors if they have already got the affected part repaired or replaced. For more details on the recall, one can visit NHTSA’s official website for the recall report. The NHTSA Recall Number for this issue is 22V-031 and the Manufacturer Recall Number for this is SC226
