NHTSA Complaint #11502274 — 2016 KIA OPTIMA

I had a catastrophic engineer failure that was reporting a DTC to replace the spark plug/ignition coil. This failure is miss mapped and had no previous Indicator warning the customer of a engine failure that would potentially leave the customer in an unsafe condition stranded. I had to have my vehicle towed in for service and the dealer informed that the vehicle needed a new intake valve. The intake valve failure at 118k miles is a little outside of warranty but still considerably young for an engine. There could be a number of reasons for this failure, material quality could make the valve brittle, manufacturing so the retainers could not seat properly in the spring. All the reasons are not customer induced nor at the stage in engine life that would be appropriate. After reviewing the Kia main social media account and talking to several dealers this type of failure is not uncommon for this product line as early as 30k miles. I believe that the volume of failure is large enough population that Kia should investigate 1) the mapping of DTCs/Indicator warning to the customer and 2) the actual engine failure population is large enough it should be reviewed by the government.