Top 5 Problems Kia Sorento SUV 3rd Generation 2015-20

Hey, friends. It's Len here from 1A Auto. Today, we've got another top problems video for you, and it's going to be on a Gen 3 Kia Sorento. Let's get started.

Let's take a look at these headlights again. One of the first things I always like to talk about in my videos is a safety issue. And if you can't see, especially in the dark, you're going to have a major safety issue. Unfortunately, it's very common on these vehicles for one or multiple headlights to burn out, and it seems to happen very frequently. Let's talk about it. So, now, let's get under the hood and start talking about some causes. Come on over here. If you were to come to the headlamp assembly and look behind it, you're going to see this little cover. Go ahead and unscrew that. And if you were to take a peek behind there, you're going to see where the headlight bulb is located. So, now, we have a clear view of where the issue might be. Of course, you'll probably have the issue with the bulb where it's not working, more than likely it's due to the filament that's inside there, but we need to figure out how come the filming keeps going bad. Yeah, bulbs are wear items and they're going to go bad over time, but it shouldn't go bad several times in one year. This issue could stem from something as simple as the alternator being bad internally, it's going to have an issue with the voltage regulator causing spikes. If you were to look down along the belt side of the engine, you'll be able to see the alternator. This is something that you should be able to test with something like a multimeter. The alternator may be an issue, but it's less likely than the other issue, which just basically comes down to the wiring itself. It's been notated that what people do to fix this issue would, of course, be to replace both bulbs. But then also what you'd want to do is you'd want to replace the wiring harness that leads to the headlamp bulbs.

Most times it's an issue with amperage. So, what happens is there isn't enough resistance coming from the wires and there's too much amperage running down to the headlamp bulbs. And, of course, it's causing them to overheat and it's going to blow the weakest link, which, of course, would be the film inside the bulb. That's going to be the first thing to go. If you happen to notice that the bulb did go out and you came out here and you took this all apart and you grabbed onto this area, you might notice that it's super hot at that point. Like super duper hot. Is it going to be warm normally? Yeah, of course, it's going to be warm, but this is going to be extra hot. If you were to grab onto these wires, you might even feel like you could twist this coating around. It seems like it's nice and loose. This one feels good. It's not hot in any way right now, obviously. But if you could feel it and it was super hot, or even if you were to take the bulb out, let's see if I can get that off of there, and take a peek in here, you might see that the plastic areas around those metal parts or the terminals might look like it's melted or swollen, or even just kind of you know, crumbled up, cracked. That's due to overheating. Of course, in that case, what you would want to do, like I said, you would replace the bulbs, and then it would also make sense to go ahead and replace the wiring harness for the headlight assemblies. One other note that I just like to mention real quick, if you were looking at your headlamp assemblies and you happen to notice that they're glazed or they're hazed, or you just can't see very much light emittance coming out of them because the plastic's been broken down over time, 1A Auto does, of course, offer a kit. It's going to have both headlamps as a set and it's reasonably priced. So, I would, of course, go for that because your vision affects your ability to be safe in all driving instances.

Now, the second thing I want to talk about on this vehicle is a severe rattling noise, and it's most common on startup. So, now, the symptoms for this as stated would be you go to start up the vehicle, and as soon as you start, you hear a tatatatatatatat and usually, it'll kind of fade away and even disappear after approximately four to five seconds. Overall, if this doesn't happen and the engine noise continues to happen for an extended period of time, more than likely it doesn't have to do with the oil level. But the oil level is definitely something that you want to check, including conditions. We'll come right over underneath the hood here, we're going to grab onto this engine oil dipstick. We'll pull it right up. I like to wipe it off. And then, of course, you would put it back in and recheck the level. Let's take a quick look at where we should be though. If you were to look at the dipstick, you're going to see a dot with an F near and dot with an L near it. F for full, L for low, pretty basic. If your oil level's anywhere in between, you're doing all right. If the engine oil is low, below that low dot, I would, of course, try to add some oil to it. Try to get it up as close to that full dot as possible. Once you did that, go ahead and start up the vehicle, let it run for a little while, warmup, and then let it cool for several hours. At that point, start it back up and check for that noise. If the noise started right when you started it and it went tatatata and then went away real quick, then you know you're probably all right. If the noise continued like it did before, then more than likely it has to do with another issue, which would involve the timing chain tensioner. I'd like for you to always try to keep in mind to check your oil level. Just going by the maintenance schedule isn't always going to be helpful because a lot of times the maintenance schedule can be stretched out for a long period of time, and what you're going to notice is the engine goes through oil and a much quicker amount of time. So, just get under the hood, pull the dipstick, if it looks like it's low, go ahead and add a little bit of oil until it gets up to that full mark. Don't go anywhere above that.

If you happen to notice when you're driving your vehicle that the oil light turns on, you need to pull over immediately. You need to turn off your engine and check that oil level. It's more than likely going to be way below that low level, maybe even another half a quart below that. At that point, you know that your engine oil is at least 1 to 1.5 quarts low or even more, which is very bad for the engine and it can cause detrimental damage. So, now, assuming that you check that oil level and you went through the process of making sure that it's nice and full, and it still made that noise, like I said, it has to do with the timing chain tensioner. It's very common. Kia actually came up with an upgraded system for it, and, of course, you could do it, but it's not going to be the easiest job because it's going to be all located behind all this mess right there. If it's something that you think you could tackle on your own, good luck. And if it's something that you think might be a little bit over your head, I probably wouldn't go for it on my own and I would just bring it on down to a reputable shop.

Now, the third thing that I want to talk about inside these vehicles is right up in the dash. If you were to look at the console here, see your airbag light comes on. That's super annoying. Maybe you're driving around, you've never been in any sort of an accident, why would your airbag light get on? Let's talk about it. So, now, going with the assumption, like I said, you've never been in an accident and there isn't any type of body damage that might trigger a sensor of any sort, the reasons why that the light might commonly come on on these particular vehicles could be one of two things. First of all, it could be the clock spring, which is located behind the horn/steering wheel right here. It's fairly uncommon, but that is something that does technically go bad with these vehicles. Another thing that goes bad with them would be located right here. If I can see underneath this plastic right there, you're going to see your airbag module. It goes bad inside and it causes the light to come on, whether it's a communication issue or whatever the case may be, it's an internal failure and you actually need to replace the module. Now, before you just go ahead and replace that airbag module, I want you to think about a couple of different things. You need to make sure that you diagnose the issue first. With that said, before you start on plugging anything to try to determine if there's any issues, you always want to make sure that you disconnect your negative battery terminal and, of course, you wait for those capacitors that are holding energy in the system to dilute or basically decapacitate so there's no more energy flowing through the system because you don't want your airbag to go off incidentally.

Now, the fourth thing that I want to talk about on these vehicles has to do with the check engine light. Let's say you get a check engine light on, you pull over, you pull those codes with your little code reader that you can get pretty much anywhere, and it's going to come up with a pretty vague thing that you want to start looking for to figure out what's going on with your engine. It's probably going to come up with something, in this case, at least saying, you have a misfire or you have a circuit open. And a lot of times what this comes down to is a coil issue. When the check engine light comes on and you're noticing that you have a misfire condition where you notice that your engine is shaking around, you're sitting in your vehicle, you can feel kind of like really unsteady shake, and it makes you nervous. A lot of people tend to think it's because of the spark plugs because spark plugs are a wear item and they tend to wear down pretty fast overall. But on this vehicle, the spark plugs actually are supposed to go approximately 105,000 miles before they go bad. So, would it makes sense to replace those spark plugs to try to fix the maintenance issue or the misfire? Well, maybe you might want to check them. It is a good idea to check them. Just take a peek, don't grab a gapper, and go in between the Iridium parts of the spark plug though, because you're going to cause damage just to say. If the spark plug looks good on the corresponding cylinder, the next thing I would do is check out the coil.

Is there something you're going to see what the coil that's going to make you think that it's bad? More than likely not, but there are some places you can look. You can look right here to see if it looks like it's melted or discolored or anything. You can look right in here for approximately the same thing, see if you see any dirt, debris, funny colors in there. More than likely you're not going to physically see anything wrong with this coil. The way that you'll be able to tell if there is a coil issue and you can diagnose it fairly easily without spending any money, take out the coil from the corresponding cylinder that you believe is bad because the code's going to tell you where to look, and then take it and switch it with another coil. All right. Plug them both in, clear that engine light, take your vehicle for a ride. Hopefully, the engine light stays out, more than likely it won't, it's going to come back on. When it does, see if that says that it still has this problem in the same cylinder, or maybe it moved to where you moved that coil to. If the issue moved to where you move the coil to, you know there was probably a problem with the coil. If that was the case, I would just replace it and you can get one at 1aauto.com.

Number five that I want to talk about on this vehicle is let's say you're driving down the road. Your engine starts making a severe knocking noise, [vocalization] and all of a sudden you lose power. Get off to the side of the road just before the engine completely conks out. Let's talk about it. So, now, let's say you got off the side of the road safely. You called and you got your vehicle towed to the auto mechanic, and they're going to go ahead and want to try to check it out. The way that they're going to have to check it out is, of course, they're going to check the oil level, like we said before on one of the other common problems. Because if your oil level's low, of course, you're going to have engine noise. But to get more into this, if you were to take a look at the engine, we'll just go with this right here because this is what type of engine I have just sitting around because it has the common parts that we need to talk about. If you were to look at this right here, this is your piston, all right, it's going to be inside here normally. This right here is the connecting rod. There's, of course, this area up here that needs to pivot. So, it needs to be well-oiled. And, of course, it has bearings in there. And then on the bottom side where the crank is where this is supposed to sit on, it has a different type of bearing. If you were to lift this up off of here, you're going to see it's just this little shoe. Now, looking at the bottom side of that shoe, you can see that this is in very poor condition. So, the reason why this wore down like this is because if you were to look at this hole right there, you're going to see that there's a whole bunch of holes going down the line in each area where the piston is supposed to be. That's going to be the lubrication points. If there's no oil getting through there, it's not going to be able to lubricate. It's going to overheat. It's going to scour. And then more than likely, it's just going to adhere or almost weld itself due to severe heat and you know?

Because every time your crank's turning around, your pistons are going up and down, up and down, up and down inside here, which causes the combustion, you know, of burning the fuel and air mixture. Causes combustion, it forces this back down, spins your crank around. This needs to be able to rotate basically like, this up and down, up and down as this comes around. If it's not lubricated, it's going to get very hot inside and it's going to cause potential very bad damage and/or catastrophic damage to your engine. Now, with all this said, it's pretty much going to come down to your piston connecting rod bearings. It's not going to be the easiest job to try to fix on your own though I would have to say. You're going to have to pull your engine. You're going to have to pull it completely apart. You're going to have to get a whole bunch of miscellaneous parts. You're going to have to know a whole bunch of knowledge about specifications and torques and all sorts of things. And it's going to be very labor-intensive. It's not really something for a novice. Other things that people might try to do if they have this issue where the engine pretty much seizes up is they would just go ahead and replace that engine. But more than likely, it's going to cost you approximately $6,000 to $8,000 overall, which is kind of costly for a lot of people. Overall, one of the best things you can do to try to keep this from happening is just keeping up on that maintenance. Don't just go by the maintenance schedule, but get underneath the hood and check your oil once in a while, because it does go low fairly frequently.

Okay, friends. So, we had a lot of fun making this video for you. Hopefully, you learned a little something along the way. If you did and you want to talk about it, leave it in the comments section below. If you liked the video, go ahead and smash on that like button for me, it's going to mean the world. While you're at it, why don't you go ahead and subscribe and ring the bell? That way there, you can be kept up with all of our latest content.