In case you hadn’t heard, Mini is fending off certain corners of the internet over the Cooper’s Union Jack taillights. Because the flag of the United Kingdom wasn’t designed with driver notifications in mind, splitting the crosses down the middle makes the resulting arrows point to the middle of the vehicle when they’re placed at the corners of a car. All the turn signals on certain Kia Sedona minivans, on the other hand, have a more serious issue than a difference of design opinion. The automaker’s working with the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration on a recall of 88,576 Sedonas from the 2015 to 2017 model years because using the turn signal lever might cause the opposite signal to blink.
Kia and the NHTSA have been looking into the issue since May, tracing its cause to the Sedona’s Smart Junction Box. A software logic problem in the box can misinterpret signals coming from the turn signal multifunction switch, and activate the opposite signal to the one the driver wants.
Affected Sedonas were built between July 21, 2014, and June 10, 2016, but they weren’t built in consecutive VIN order. Owners with questions can contact their Kia dealer or Kia’s customer assistance center. The automaker will begin notifying owners by mail from Nov. 12, 2021, to get their Sedonas to dealers to have the junction box software updated. The fix will be performed free of charge.
On a side note, while looking into documents for this post, we discovered that Kia’s VP and Chief Safety Officer based in Irvine, California, refers to himself in letters to the NHTSA as “Mr. J.S. (Jurassic) Park,” which gave us just the chuckle we needed today.
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