My dad is a complex person like all dads are, but he’s not a complicated one. So when I saw that his 2012 Kia Soul suddenly had a Bertone orange steering wheel lock hugging the well-worn wheel, I was certain he didn’t buy it with his own money and quickly asked how he’d procured it. “Kia sent it to me,” he explained.
The topic of my dad’s thrift has surfaced here before, so I should clarify that both my parents are extremely generous. When they showed up yesterday to visit, they brought a Lego kit for my daughter and enough chocolate to keep me content until Halloween.
They also brought their Kia Soul+, a car with more than 175,000 miles on the original spark plugs. The little subcompact has held up quite well and needed very little aside from routine maintenance items, though the steering wheel is chipping and the original key broke off the car’s apparently useless fob. With apologies to Huibert, the only adornments are the cross-drilled rotors and red front brake calipers my dad recently installed (my dad used to work security for NHRA events in Houston and knew a guy with a brake company, so he got a deal).
There’s a loud whine as the car drives – one that my dad insists is caused by air running through the rotors, but clearly is a failing wheel bearing (or two). I will eventually convince him to fix that. In the meantime, my dad’s most immediate concern has recently been keeping the Soul from getting stolen.
Why? Because some teenagers figured out how to steal Kia products with a USB cable and told everyone on TikTok about it. I’d like to say this is some sort of hi-tech kid hacking, but it turns out someone just realized that a bunch of Kia and Hyundai products were sold without the immobilizers common on lots of modern cars. If you knock the cylinder pin-tumbler part of the lock off (which you can do with almost no effort), you can just stick a USB-sized whatever in the hole and the car starts like normal.
This omission was probably a cost-save, but between the recall and the $200 million settlement, I’m not sure that’s ultimately worked out for the company.
So when my dad got a letter stating that he could get a free steering wheel lock, he jumped at the chance. More specifically, he called Kia (there was a QR code but my father was not interested in trying to make that work), and they verified his ownership and sent a lock in the mail.
“It came in a biiig box” my dad told me, pantomiming something about the size of a rifle.
As you can see in the video below, it works well enough:
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After playing with it I’m now convinced that we should take two cars with steering wheel locks and try to race them around a track. We might have to get out of the car a few times, but I think it’s doable.
This also revealed a key difference between my father and me. I viewed this development with some incredulity. As a journalist, I was initially disturbed that Kia’s solution was to just send my dad a knockoff brand The Club (there’s also a software upgrade coming that’s maybe of some utility). I mentioned this in Slack and everyone else basically felt the same.
My dad just shrugged it off.
It was a major inconvenience to have to worry about his car getting pinched, but the Soul’s actual value has to be under $2,000, so a $30 steering wheel lock theoretically raises the value of the car by a not insignificant amount. My dad purchased this car for around $15,000 more than a decade ago so his lifetime running costs have been ridiculously low.
I do worry about my dad’s Soul a little bit (the capital S kind). I hope and suspect my parents will live a lot longer so they’ll likely need another car sooner rather than later, though the next one might be their last car. The Soul works, and they can afford to keep it going (once they replace the front wheel bearings). I’m not sure what they could replace it with that’s in their budget and can stay on the road long enough to serve them.
If this keeps the Soul on the road for a few more miles I guess that’s good enough.
[Ed Note: An automaker sending a customer a club is just absurd and hilarious to me. Such a mechanical and old school device to be sending customers in 2023. -DT]
Pleeeease, they probably ran the numbers and decided it was worth it.
Matt, once again Kia has let it’s customers down!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JodD_KARacg
You can always tell just how weak a lock is without even watching the LPL video, just look at the length of it. This is only 2 mins long and more than half of that is introduction.
Very true!
Coincidentally I just watched this vid 3 days ago, and then here is Matt’s article!
So I just had to share!
I was coming down here to post the same link when I saw yours 😉 Hopefully Matt sees it and writes a follow up article where he picks his dad’s Kia club.
its
As an owner of a 2011 Sonata I can say that the software fix they rolled out has made the cars harder to steal. Unfortunately that hasn’t stopped the tick tocking teens from breaking in and wrecking my steering column for the second time now.
It’s ridiculous. My mom’s car has been stolen 2x and vandalized 2x as well. The 2 steals were before the software update and the 2 vandalizations were because the kids realized they couldn’t get the car to start.
Kids (and most people) are dumb, so even if you have the recalls done and the club, they’re probably still going to cause some damage to your Kia/Hyundai before they realize they can’t take it.
My mom doesn’t even live in a bad area. But unfortunately, she lives in a place with a common parking garage and not much security.
Suffice it to say, she is turned off of Kia/Hyundai even though she’s had 3 previous excellent Hyundais, and is currently looking for something to trade in her car on.
Kia/Hyundai did not handle this well, especially considering how many models are affected and the wide breadth of years as well. To say nothing of the incredibly lazy and cheap design of the steering column and ignition.
I’m disappointed it’s not Kia-logoed. Surely they ordered enough of these things that it’d have been worth it.
And it’d be the kind of thing Matt’s daughter would be writing about on Autopian Nextgen years from now…”Check this out, it was with the car when they gave it to me. And yeah, the Kia uses this thing called ‘gasoline’ can you believe it? I have to special order it from Ama-X-on and a special enclosed protective drone drops it off!”
“Ama-X-on” is a stroke of genius right there, well played sir.
I find it hard to believe a person would steal one of these unlocked with the keys in it.
Its for joyriding, not flipping for a profit.
Yes because as we all know people buy KIAs for the joy of driving them.
sometimes the most fun car to drive is the one you don’t care about at all.
Besides they’re doing it for the clicks, not driving enjoyment.
Okay let’s see if I remember correctly s:/
You’d be very wrong. Thefts shot up over 400% in multiple areas and it was over 90% Kias/Hyundais.
Oh Kia…
Why not just mail Mitsubishi badges to your customers? Anti-theft decals.
HEY, NOW
(I believe Nissan is the brand you’re looking for here.)
Honestly, I almost went with Nissan. It was a toss up.
Some years ago I passed a vehicle along to another part of the family so their eldest could drive it. When it needed front hubs, the yute received the parts as a Xmas gift.
The Xmas gift to his dad was that I would hire a shop to handle the installation so he wouldn’t need to do it. 🙂 The repairs were made and everyone was happy.
That steering wheel has leprosery
Yeah… My knee jerk thought was to question what he did to get it so rough looking. Then I remembered it’s a KIA where they left out the $0.30 immobilizer chips to save on production costs, and for all I know they all do that. Inquiring minds want to know! How did it get that way?
I feel like this is where you insert the obligatory “It’s a Hyundai/Kia thing” (spoken in a mocking Jeep cadence).
They make some very reliable cars but they also miss some incredibly esoteric details.
My Sonata was a marvel of mechanical reliability, but the trim was falling off on the outside, the inside “chrome” trim was peeling off and would stab you if you grabbed it wrong, and the audio equipment all died a quick death (which is fine, I popped in some Pioneer stuff I had lying around).
Everybody knows you just cut the steering wheel with a bolt cutter, right?
Right. It’s like buying an expensive padlock and putting it on a hasp secured with two wood screws.
Good excuse to replace the peeling steering wheel anyway. I think hiding a fuel pump cutoff switch would be more successful. With the Club it’s plainly obvious what the job will consist of. A hidden fuel pump switch will leave the thief wondering why the POS won’t start, probably not worth their time. Might only come out to find a dead battery.
The cheapest/easiest solution would probably be to “upgrade” all of these cars to a “push button start” where the key is still required, but the switch part of the assembly is disconnected with a pigtail harness to a push button that is drilled into the dash somewhere with a receiver and a key fob similar to what you get in a keyless start package. I’m sure they have keyless ignition in a handful of models in 2023, so you’re mostly down to some quick package engineering, and probably… $10-15 worth of parts. Install would be on the order of an hour for the dealerships. Or better yet, (more brain cells engaged there for a second) an intercept device between the switch and the stock harness with the same key fob and receiver. Now you’re easily down to under an hour (faster after the dealer monkeys get a few under their belt), and parts cost on the order of MAYBE $5.
While it isn’t dirt cheap, you can convert to a push button start and do it it yourself. It’s at least cheaper than what they charge for their own anti-theft system. Did it for my 2014 Soul
https://www.jordandistributors.com/collections/electronics/products/ghost-key-plug-and-play-push-to-start-conversion-kit-for-hyundai-and-kia-vehicles
Wouldn’t a hidden battery cut-off switch be more effective? I read some other Kia/Hyundai victim stories of thieves driving off with their cars despite installing a fuel pump cutoff. Granted, they recovered the vehicle a mile or so away because the gas in the lines was all that was left.
It’s even easier than that (evidently)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JodD_KARacg
The whole problem is that the cars can be stolen with no tools, no preparation other than watching a Tik-Tok video on how to do it, if that.
People aren’t stealing these shitboxes to sell them
A cop told me a long time ago that they recover lots of stolen cars with working clubs in the backseat, but they almost never find clubs that have been disabled by the thief (including on the side of the road at the scene of the theft). In a choice between my gray CRV with a club and the one two stalls away without, I expect a thief will choose the clubless car every time.
Deterrence, not prevention. That’s also how I explain the garbage and camping debris all over the interior.
The go to move is to just cut the steering wheel if they wanted it bad enough. Battery powered death wheel and it’s off in under a minute. It’s more about being annoying like you said.
Just put my Mom’s 1994 Accord garage queen on the road. The thing is a peach, <100k miles. Digging out an old Club someone gave me to have handy if I park somewhere crappy
Especially since basically any 90s import (and likely more) can be stolen in the exact same way as the Kia’s. That is what has fascinated me about this issue the whole time. Its not new, just the ability to disseminate this information to idiots and douchebags has improved. Thanks TikTok. As stated below, the usb thing is just convenience, but this is the same as the old remove tumbler and turn ignition with screwdriver trick. A friend showed me how break steering wheel locks too, years ago in a junkyard.
Remember having to pull a broken ignition cylinder on a friend’s Toyota in college, all you then needed was a flat blade screwdriver to start it.
Yup. In the late 90’s I had an 1989 Camry that could be started with a screwdriver or anything remotely key-shaped after the ignition cylinder wore out, can confirm. It got stolen, the police found it at a chop shop 18 months later and I went back to driving it. They removed my Kenwood pull out stereo so reinstalled the stock AM/FM radio that was in the trunk.
I got my Monte Carlo back with a better stereo and an amplifier than I had in it. Plus a bass tube, peak 90s.
Not a bad idea to use a Club for your mom’s car. I had a ’94 Accord for 20 years, sold it to a flipper (“It’s for my wife but I’ll test drive it for her.” Sure, buddy.) Anyway, about a year later I Googled my old license plate number and found a tweet from a high school girl about 60 miles away: “If anyone sees a Honda with license number [my old plate] let me know. It’s been stolen.”
Haven’t seen a reference to it since, so I assume it ended up living on a big farm with some nice new owners.
Was it a vanity plate that you sold or something? I always take my plates when selling a car and I’ve never seen plates actually go with a car before.
In my state, non-personalized plates generally go with the car when it’s sold. I’m sure there are exceptions, but in my case the plates stayed on the car (at least until it met its fate…).
In my apartment building parking lot, every Kia has a broken out rear window and a Club. I’ve also found a ditched stolen car here last winter, surprisingly not a Kia..
Watch the video where the guy opens the lock in 5 secs without the assigned key that came with it…LOL
The leather on that steering wheel looks way worse than the shiny spot on my same aged Soul. I guess having the midlevel trim (2u up here) has one perk.
Also Canada has required an immobilizer in all cars since 2007 or 2008 which is probably a much bigger advantage right now.
Counterpoint: I hate immobilizers. My daily tripped the theft warning a few weeks ago and won’t start any longer. My troubleshooting hasn’t come up with a solution and the mechanic I had troubleshoot it can’t figure it out either. Unfortunately I am likely going to end up scrapping a perfectly serviceable vehicle because the thing thinks it’s stolen.
Funny enough Kia had an issue like this in their 2nd Gen Sedonas. The immobilizer chip in the key worked great, but there were solder flow issues on the PCB of the ECU itself that could, after years and miles, cause the security system to not return a signal when you turn on the car, making the ECU think it was a theft attempt. Making things more annoying is that it would be an intermittent condition, as the part rattled, heated, and cooled.
The fix was to wire in a jumper resistor between two specific pins on the ECU connector, which basically tricked the security system with a “correct” value even if the connection inside the ECU had taken a vacation.
I was pretty enthusiastic about the strides Kia/Hyundai made, until the Theta engine and USB fiascos. Not so much that something went wrong, but the ludicrous response after they were caught red handed cutting costs. No thanks.
Dude note, my work parking garage routinely has a gate that is inoperable because one of these stolen cars rips it down on the way out. Three this summer alone…
They use them to ram into the front of pot shops here to steal from them.
And of course this has created a booming bollard installation industry…
Remember when these stopped all car theft?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Clubs and removable decks were all the rage! Ah, the bad old days.
Ahh.. the days of walking around the mall swinging an Alpine around like a metal purse.
Did your dad ever express an opinion of the “Hamster” commercials for the Kia Soul?
He liked them! Also, I know a hamster!
From a PR stand point, the only worse thing Kia/Hyundai could have done than Clubbing their customers is clubbing baby seals.
My parents have a Hyundai Elantra Touring (’09) that somehow dodged this issue. Apparently Hyundai started cheaping out in 2011, as only the ’11 and ’12 model years are affected.
Theirs has something like 180k on it, but they’ve taken very, very good care of it. It has none of the problems that mine had, or the one that a friend had. There’s something to be said for buying a car new or newish, and driving it into the ground.
I’ll add that someone tried to steal my sister’s Soul (car) a few weeks ago, so, yeah, I’d recommend using that club.
That’s lucky for them, but part of the problem is that very stupid people are doing the thievery and they aren’t exactly meticulous about seeing what year/model a car is before starting the break-in.
Your parents may still end up with a vandalized ride due to all this nonsense.
This is true. Luckily for them this car sits in a garage or goes to a monitored parking garage and the grocery store.
Hmmmm, they might want to consider a club for visiting my siblings though.
Thieves just gonna see the LPL video and get the jiggler key.
https://youtu.be/JodD_KARacg?feature=shared
I was just about to link that
The local police departments in my area have been distributing steering wheel locks to Kia/Hyundai owners for a while now.
I, too, suspected some high-tech hacking when I read the headlines about cars being “stolen with USB cables”, but it’s really no different from jamming a screwdriver in there.
I guess it’s a bit of old news at this point, but I’m still curious what the software update is supposed to do in the absence of a [hardware] immobilizer. Could that be a possible future Autopian technical article?
The bad news is the club can be stolen via Firewire.
Wow well at least the teens won’t have any clue what that is haha
LOL
Literal LOL
Literal literal
Sigh… The English language…
Can confirm, zero utility to the software upgrade. Based on how half-ass their other engineering solutions have been, it also seems that Kia assumes a “KIA ANTITHEFT LOGIC” sticker on the driver’s side door counts as a software upgrade.
My partner’s Sportage was stolen in broad daylight in July, a week after she got the software bodge. The police found meth in it. Every interior component had to either be fumigated or thrown out. We just got the car back from the Kia dealership in what they consider good-as-new shape: missing a sun visor and with a nice big meth pipe burn in the headliner.
This car has been in a constant state of recall, and the recall fixes to the half-assed engineering have chronically been themselves half-assed. For the math and engineering majors in the room, this leaves us with a quarter-assed car.
Easily stolen because Kia is the only company to half-ass the inclusion of immobilizers? Enjoy your useless software upgrade and your anti-theft stickers. And enjoy not having your car for three months after it gets stolen because meth ain’t quick or easy to clean out.
Conrod bearings eating themselves due to half-assed oiling? Half-assed knock sensor software that will happily throw the car into limp mode in the middle of a freeway! Because woops, the half-assed software needed its own half-assed recall for an update.
Prolific oil consumption due to half-assed oil control ring specification? Get bent, the manual says 1qt/1000mi consumption is a very normal thing for a car with well under 100k miles on it.
I can’t begin to describe how deeply their shoddy mid-2010s products have ruined Hyundai-Kia as a company for me.
Oof. That’s rough.
It sucks because there’s so many great things about this era of Hyundai/Kia vehicles. But man, not very many of them have lasted. In fact, most of the 00’s products seem to hold up for longer. A lot of my friends and family have been describing their experiences of these brands as “VW-esque”. YIKES.
The immobilizer scandal (yeah, I’d call it a scandal at this point) is totally unacceptable, and realllllllly makes me hesitant to consider either brand in the future.
Hey, no way, they make great cars now and their engineering culture has totally changed over for the better (against the natural decline of nearly every company over time) this isn’t the same Hyundai KIA of
20002005201020152020!You forgot to add that it will be at least weeks before any repair even without meth being involved because of a lack of parts.
Due to Covid you ask…. No, not really. Due to the impossibly large amount of cars being stolen/vandalized/damaged causing massive scarcity because the mfr was too dumb to design a decent ignition system in the first place.
Kia Rio owner here. Kia sent me a club this summer. I’ve used it exactly zero times.
I notice I check the rear-view often when I drive the Rio to see if anyone seems to be following me. I will use the when I park in sketchy area, but so far my spider sense has not tingled, such as people watching as I exit the car, or other vehicles parking at the same time.
Maybe debadging the thing contributes to my luck.
Its always funny to me how people absorb news. Being into cars, I had, for years, heard of the Kia and Hyundai recalls and issues here. Not the same for a friend of mine. She had a daughter a few months before my son was born, and upon visiting, I found out some Tik-Tokers had stolen her Kia with this same trick. I just assumed everyone who had one of these cars would know about this issue. I ended up buying a knock-off Club at Walmart for like $20 a bringing it over to her once the police found her car and returned it… Not everyone is plugged in to this stuff, unfortunately…
Unfortunately, knowing about the issue doesn’t do you much good. Even with all the recalls done, a club, and a sticker to warn would-be thieves….. many of them don’t care and will break in anyway only to realize they can’t steal the car.
Yeah you have a car waiting for you the next morning, but you also have a crap load of broken glass and other things to fix.
Unless you are lucky enough to have secure and/or private parking…. this is a huge problem.