Kia: 21 published Texas lemon law decisions
Every published TxDMV decision naming Kia, for case-years 2014-2026, with what each order did and a link to the order itself.
This is not a census of Texas lemon vehicles, and no number on this page is a defect rate. Confidential settlements, manufacturer buybacks agreed before a hearing, and complaints withdrawn along the way never enter this corpus at all and are structurally invisible to it. What is counted here is contested proceedings that reached a published decision, which is a small and non-random slice of everything that goes wrong with a vehicle in Texas.
A manufacturer with more decisions here is not "more of a lemon" than one with fewer. It may simply have sold far more units in Texas, or its owners may be likelier to push a dispute to a contested hearing rather than settle. There is no sales or registration denominator behind these counts, so the division that would turn them into a rate cannot be done, and this site does not publish one.
What these 21 orders did
Counts of published proceedings naming Kia. These are not shares of anything: there is no figure here for how many vehicles Kia sold in Texas, so no proportion computed from this table would mean what it appears to mean.
| What the order did | Decisions |
|---|---|
| Repurchase ordered | 6 |
| Repair ordered | 5 |
| Dismissed | 10 |
Which vehicles these decisions were about
Make and model exactly as the source documents print them, so a model that two orders name differently appears twice rather than being silently merged. A model appearing more often is not a defect rate.
| Vehicle | Decisions |
|---|---|
| Kia Sorento | 5 |
| Kia Soul | 4 |
| Kia EV6 | 2 |
| Kia Rio | 2 |
| Kia K5 | 1 |
| Kia K900 | 1 |
| Kia Niro | 1 |
| Kia Optima Hybrid | 1 |
| Kia Sorento LX | 1 |
| Kia Sorrento | 1 |
| Kia Stinger GT | 1 |
| Kia Telluride | 1 |
By vehicle model year
The model year of the vehicle at issue, not the year the decision issued.
| Model year | Decisions |
|---|---|
| 2024 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2 |
| 2022 | 3 |
| 2021 | 5 |
| 2020 | 2 |
| 2019 | 1 |
| 2015 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2 |
| 2013 | 1 |
| 2012 | 3 |
Every Kia decision
21 recordsNewest decision first. Every row links the source document it was read from.
Source PDF 2024 Kia Sorento
second-row passenger seat folds/slides unexpectedly Repair ordered
Source PDF 2023 Kia Sorento
vehicle stopping while driving with dashboard warning indicators and stuck in park Repurchase ordered
Source PDF 2022 Kia EV6
intermittent total electrical shutdown while driving (EV) Dismissed
Source PDF 2021 Kia Sorento
check engine light with loss of acceleration Repair ordered
Source PDF 2022 Kia Telluride
steering column vibration at highway speeds Repair ordered
Source PDF 2020 Kia Niro
pulling to the right, jerking on acceleration Repurchase ordered
Source PDF 2021 Kia Rio
drift at highway speed, backup camera and radio faults Repurchase ordered
Source PDF 2020 Kia Soul
alignment drift, engine shutoff, TPMS warning, oil consumption Dismissed
Source PDF 2015 Kia K900
door locks intermittently lock occupants out; key fob will not unlock vehicle Dismissed
Source PDF 2012 Kia Soul
stop/start button malfunction (vehicle will not start or will not shut off) Dismissed
Source PDF 2014 Kia Sorento
door lock and air conditioning malfunctions, rumbling/thumping noise Dismissed
Source PDF 2012 Kia Sorento LX
hesitation then lurching on acceleration from a stop Repurchase ordered
The honest use of this page is to read the orders. Every row links the document it came from, and those documents say what happened in a specific dispute over a specific vehicle: what the defect was, how many repair attempts there were, and what the examiner ordered.
The dishonest use is to treat the number at the top as a quality score. It counts contested proceedings that reached a published decision, which is a function of how many vehicles a manufacturer sells in Texas, how its warranty department handles disputes before they get that far, and how likely its owners are to push a case to hearing rather than accept an offer. Those are three different things, and none of them is the reliability of the vehicle.