What 100,000 Miles Did to Kia’s Cheapest Sportage Hybrid (Problems, Replacements, Experiences)

What's up guys. I have a confession to make. I have driven this car over 100,000 miles since 2022. Please don't tell my insurance company. But at least that gives me a pretty good idea of how this car has held up over that time so you know what to expect. So today we're going to find out if this 2023 Kia Sportage Hybrid in the poor people trim of course is totally clapped out or if she's got another 100,000 miles in her. Now I know the vast majority of you did not click on this video to see a four banger Kia Sportage SUV go zero to 90 but I just felt like you would enjoy it so here it is. All right guys quick disclaimer before we get into things. I am not a Kia fanboy. I'm not a fancy car channel. I'm not sponsored. I'm not getting paid to make this video. I'm just a dude who takes care of his car so I don't have to buy another one and I want to help you do the same. And before we get into my experiences with this vehicle specifically I just want to let you guys in on how I drive it. So for the most part I'm driving this to work. I have an 18 mile trip to work. Some of that is interstate. Some of that is local roads. So it's 36 miles round trip. That's the majority of my week driving. However when it's summertime I'm often pulling a trailer with kayaks. I have a business that I use the trailer for and I also use it just for really long leisure trips. Sometimes we're going 500-600 miles away. Pretty long distances. It's a light duty trailer but it does have a couple kayaks on the back. I also from time to time take this car off-road and by off-road I kind of mean more like the light off-road like a two-track gravel road or I might drive this through a grass field or a bean field that hasn't been tilled that's still a fairly flat friendly surface. I don't take this mudding. I don't take it in super rocky jagged areas but as you can tell by the subject of this video I drive a lot and I think this gives me a unique perspective with this vehicle and it allows me to tell you guys what to expect as you approach 100,000 miles. So instead of just rehashing my 50,000 mile review video we are going to focus on a couple key topics here. First we're going to look at the appearance both inside and outside and also underneath and then from there we're going to talk about all the problems that I've experienced with this vehicle and then to close out the video we are going to talk about all the maintenance that I have performed on this car and when I did it so that you know what to expect with your own sportage as you approach those same milestones. All right guys let's take a look at the outside. The car is not the cleanest because it is wintertime and any sort of driving gets it dirty but you can just get a general idea of how the paint has held up. Overall I have to say not bad. A lot of the blemishes that I do have are due to my own mistakes especially this one here so I'm not so much worried about that as I am those smaller finer scratches that just appear from normal daily driving and while there are some of those I don't think it's excessive I don't think it's anything outside of the ordinary. Another thing to keep in mind here is that when you're driving on the interstate a lot like I do there are going to be chips that appear on this front side of the hood so you can see an area like this that's a chip some of these are chips and with that metal exposed it is going to rust so you do need to fill those in and keep an eye on that stuff I have a plan for when it gets a little warmer to kind of do some touch up on all of these and fill these in. Come over here to this side really not much happening over here other than it being a little bit dirty. I have gotten some door dings from other people and that's caused some blemishes but for the most part for three and a half years of driving this all over the place interstate local city roads the paint does not look that bad it's not faded certainly does help that I keep it in a garage and the top is actually looking pretty pristine because it's not living outside getting all that uv exposure so definitely not bad. Let's go ahead and take a look at the interior to see how it has held up after three years of use over here in the driver's side door this plastic is fairly susceptible to scratching it's not terrible it's not very beat up there is some stuff here that shows through I'm not sure exactly what that's from but definitely nothing heavy duty because I'm not putting other materials like in the front driver's sides. In my 50,000 mile review video I said this piano black was kind of a bad idea because it's really susceptible to scratching and it shows a lot of smudges or marks you can kind of see that here I'm not sure if you guys are getting that it's not as bad as I thought it might be for deeper scratches you do get some light scratching kind of takes away the sheen but as you can see still a decent reflection when it's clean this is something that doesn't get touched much but it does show marks it shows smudges any water any sort of liquid you get on it is obviously going to leave a mark overall I think the materials in the interior have held up to use pretty well if we talk about the cloth seats they do show some staining and I haven't had these shampooed it's something on my to-do list I do scrub them down I wipe them off with water to the best of my ability but if you look here you can still see some smudges from stuff that has just gotten in there over the years as you might guess this rear cargo area does see a lot of heavy use from me I'm constantly putting gear back here and the plastic has suffered as a result I've got some deeper gouges there got some scratching here scratching here obviously because this is a cargo area this is going to see a lot more use I do have a protective mat here and I even have one underneath before you get to any of this so this certainly helps the area stay cleaner it's much easier to clean highly recommend you getting a cargo area mat then I have the rear seat protectors these attract a fair amount of dirt but that's okay because I'd rather the dirt be on that than on the back of the actual seats and this is super easy to clean just take the vacuum to it you can see some of it's falling off as I hit it while we're at it we'll just take a look at the rear interior same story with this plastic do have mats back here to help protect I usually have seats down like this to help protect the bottom of these seats in the cloth here but as you can tell this cloth does tend to show stuff as well this is just from the seat moving forward and backwards overall doesn't look too bad though for three years of heavy use all right we're going down I actually just did an oil change so I've got a couple of the panels off so we can take a look up there too but we're gonna go ahead and just look around mostly noting areas with rust or a lack thereof here we are on the driver's side wheel well got the control arm here looking nice got the ce axle there looking good the bushings here and the sway bar link still look good they still flex and as you guys can tell not a whole lot of rust or any at all just a little dirty all right we have the oil pan here and some other stuff I don't know the name of but looking good overall here too let's go ahead and move over to the passenger side looks pretty good so now we're back here in kind of the center rear portion of the car everything's looking good looking towards the back muffler looks good those rear control arms are looking good no rust there I'm not gonna crawl underneath there and get that upward shot for you I think it gets a passing grade and this is a testament to using some sort of anti-corrosion spray early on in the car's life because it really really makes a nice film and battles that corrosion if you live in states like I do in the midwest lots of salt it's gonna be a big enemy of yours when you need to do maintenance gonna be a lot harder let's go ahead and talk problems up to 100,000 miles I have had zero significant issues that have required repairs at the dealership or anything like that however there have been a few things that I've experienced that I wouldn't really necessarily lump into the problem category but to me they're a little bit bothersome and I'm not really sure if they're 100% normal for this vehicle when I am slowly accelerating at about 1.7 to 1.8 rpms I think I'm in third or fourth gear at that point I start to feel a shake or a shudder underneath the car from the transmission area I've let the dealership know when I've taken this car in for updates that that has happened they've driven it they've checked it they've assured me that this is how the car is designed or supposed to drive I'm not sure if I believe that so it could be a bug it might be a feature I'm not really sure because this is the first Kia I've owned but in any case it's something that once you notice it it's hard to not pay attention to and it really doesn't affect the ride quality or the drive quality in any way but in the back of my mind I'm wondering am I gonna have a larger transmission issue resulting from that later on so at this point I just kind of have to leave it and keep on driving the car this next issue with my Sportage has not been a chronic one and in fact I only saw it for the first time this winter after I had already put a ton of miles on it however the last time it happened I had the presence of mind to hit record on my phone as I was driving so that you guys can see this in the case that something similar is happening to you I'm actually flooring the car right now and it's stuck in EV mode you can see it's responding to the pedal with the power indicator going up all the way but there's gonna come a time where I don't have any more power and I guess we're gonna find out how the car is gonna react to that this is a problem that I've only seen three times at this point not a fan because it means you got to restart the car when it happens but I kind of want to see what happens when I let the battery drain part of the problem with this happening is that the battery is typically not supposed to fall below this level and that is to protect the lifespan of the battery itself I'm not sure if this is a lithium ion or lithium iron iron phosphate battery but in either case there's a point that you don't want to cross there's a threshold that you don't want to cross in terms of discharge because then that starts to hurt the cells that make up the battery so if you're not familiar with batteries and how they work that's the gist for why the battery doesn't discharge fully every single time all right we just got this indicator because the battery fully discharged that's no bueno says check hybrid system stop safely so that's what we're gonna do we are going to pull over and restart the car all right so we restarted and the engine's going now the battery will continue to charge but still this is a problem not sure what's causing it I've done a little bit of research on this and I found at least one other person who has experienced something similar and they seem to think that the problem originated with their dipstick or something oil related their claim was that their dipstick was supposedly loose and this was causing some sort of oil sensor to trigger and in an attempt to protect itself it let the car stay in ev mode instead of switching over to the engine now it does make sense that the car would have some sort of self-preservation mode if it sensed a problem with the oil obviously running the engine with an oil problem could cause grave issues so the vehicle staying in ev mode does make sense and I myself did a little bit of investigating with my own car I checked my oil level and even though the dipstick was properly seated I found the oil level to be a little bit higher than I wanted it to it would make sense then that I was having the same issue because it was probably triggering the same oil sensor to think that there was some sort of problem and I'm happy to report that since changing my oil and verifying that the oil level is correct and that the dipstick is seated properly I have not had this issue again so if you're experiencing something similar the first place to look is your dipstick and then you need to look at your oil level to verify that everything is okay moving on to maintenance I do all of the routine maintenance myself so I'm not going to talk much about that but you should be changing your oil every 8,000 miles or less you should be changing engine air filters and you should be changing cabin air filters regularly as well and at least monitoring them to see how dirty they are but with that said we're going to move on to some of the more expensive maintenance items that you may want to plan for okay so forgive me here I do need to use my notes because I do not have the mileages memorized when I get everything done so the first big replacement that I had to make was at 63,939 miles the OEM tires lost enough tread to warrant a replacement so I did purchase an entire set of tires just after 60,000 miles I don't think that's too bad I think you guys can expect the same amount of mileage from the stock tires and then if you want to upgrade to something that's going to maybe last a little bit longer and have a warranty you could do that at that point the set of tires that I purchased was from Discount Tire they are Yokohama YK CTXs and I want to say they cost around seven to eight hundred dollars for all four tires after running these tires for an additional 40,000 miles I haven't experienced any performance issues and they still have plenty of life left in them at about the same time as the tire replacement I also had my oil fluid drained and replaced I believe the manual recommends this at 60,000 miles I waited a little bit longer I had a nearby auto shop do it for pretty cheap they were fast they were efficient they did it more quickly and easily than I could so I just outsourced that at 70,000 miles I had to take the car into the dealership for something unrelated but they suggested that I do a fuel injector cleaning service and I'm not sure if this is necessary I think I may have gotten taken here because I'm not actually sure what they do and how they clean it are they just putting in Tecron into your gas tank and calling that a cleaning are they actually getting in there and cleaning the fuel injectors I'm not really sure so I'm not going to recommend that service but I did have it done at about 70,000 miles at the dealership at 83,500 miles I had the transmission fluid replaced which is not actually called for for most normal driving the thing is is that when I pull the trailer that's obviously more weight behind the car and it's straining the transmission a little more so these are not normal driving conditions and if you look in the manual it does actually recommend changing the transmission fluid if you're driving under more demanding conditions this is not something I did myself because I wanted this documented for warranty purposes I was still under 100,000 miles and I wanted the dealership to do it so that I was in their system in the case that I did have any transmission issues later on down the line lastly if you've seen any of my other Sportage videos you will have seen that I popped off the tire and I examined the brake pads at I think 50 or 60,000 miles and since then I still have not changed my brakes I am at 104,153 miles as of today and I still have not really needed a brake change I personally think I'm probably getting very close I have noticed that the car requires a little more pressure when I'm pushing down the brake pedal but going 100,000 miles without needing a brake change is pretty awesome I have not owned a vehicle where that has been the case it's usually 40, 50, 60,000 miles at the most but the fact that I am over 100,000 miles and still have not needed a brake change is super impressive and I'm glad I haven't had to do it because even though I know how it is kind of a pain in the butt and I've been putting it off but I do think it is coming fairly soon but I will put that out there for you guys so that you know how to do it when you're approaching that replacement yourself I'm not sure if that's going to be after 50, 60, 70, 80,000 miles for you but for me personally I have gone a very long time without a brake change and that's definitely a major advantage of driving a hybrid vehicle like this one given the fact that I have spent so many hours in this car and driven thousands of miles in it I just wanted to wrap up the video with a few takeaways about some things that I still really like and some things that I dislike some of these things I've learned along the way some of them I liked right off the bat but let's go ahead and get into them first random thing that I really like about the Sportage after driving it all this time is the inclusion of a turbo and not just the turbo but the sport mode that really makes great use of it at first when I bought this car I thought that the inclusion of a turbo was kind of strange in a Kia 4-banger SUV makes sense because a 4-banger in a mid-sized SUV is going to be taxed at certain times just because the vehicle weighs a little more and demands a little more power to move it quickly when you pop the car into sport mode you're going to feel a difference right off the bat the first thing you're going to notice is that the rpms are running a little bit higher so more fuel is being injected into the engine and this allows it to be really responsive your rate of acceleration increases the car just overall does what it does normally but faster one situation that I find myself using it a lot is if I am at a red light and I need to get off of the line quick to beat the other cars then I simply start in sport mode and accelerate almost as I would normally and the extra power that it delivers sends me off of the line quick and I'm going to beat 99% of the cars doing it that way if I really need to go someone wants to race me which is not something that happens often I simply leave it in sports mode and I floor it for a second or two and that's going to get me off very very quickly another example of real world use for me is when I need to merge onto an interstate or a highway quickly let's say that there's a very short runway popping it into sport mode for just a few seconds is usually more than enough time to get me going as fast as I need to go I'm not even going to get out of the car for this one as you can see here my rear hatch is filthy and it stays that way about 98% of the time one thing that I really have come to dislike about this car is that even if you wash it there is always going to be residue or water marks or whatever it may be on this back side there has never been a time where this is perfectly clean it doesn't really matter what you do I think it has a lot to do with how water drains off this top portion and runs down onto the window regardless whatever the case is this constantly stays dirty it constantly looks bad always has water marks doesn't matter how many times I go through the car wash you do have to hand wash it and even then there's still going to be some leftover residue so whatever not the end of the world but I really dislike it another detail of this car that I am not a fan of is the audio system if you like good quality music or you like good quality audio in any way shape or form this is not the car for your listening experience it does the job but what it does not do is make okay sounding audio sound even better or make great sounding audio sound mind-blowing it is the most basic stock speaker system you could ever ask for and that's okay it's a Kia Sportage what else do you want but it is something that over time you start to notice if you're a bit of an audiophile and I personally am going to be replacing the stock front speakers to start with and we'll see how that goes and one last thing that I have really come to love about my Sportage is the lane assist or the steering assistance this feature is honestly something that I don't think I'm going to be able to live without in any other car in the future it is such a game changer it makes really long trips a little better because you're not constantly micromanaging the steering wheel it allows you to free up a hand or two to do other things quickly some of my favorite things to do while I have it on of course are read books watch movies take naps drive at reckless speeds with no hands and a lot of other things I can't really say on YouTube okay to be serious I'm just kidding about those things but it really is nice to free up a hand or two when you need to grab a drink or put something over in the passenger side and with that said everyone I think that is going to be it for the 100,000 mile review of this car I will see you at 200,000 now back to reading my book