The 2024 Kia Seltos and Soul are at the center of an alarming new recall that could see a side curtain airbag blow up for no apparent reason. The parts must now be replaced as a result of a manufacturing error.
Fortunately, Kia is only aware of two incidents of this actually occurring in the field, and the first case involved a Soul that had not been sold, and was sitting in a dealer lot. That incident occurred on July 10, 2023, and the dealer could find no evidence of an accident.
Dealer employees also looked at the data logs of the airbag control unit, and found no record of the airbag’s deployment. Kia sent a field technical specialist out to the location to examine the car, but could not find anything wrong with it.
Read: Takata Is Back At It As BMW X3, X4, And X5 Recalled Over Exploding Inflators
On September 1, a second instance of this occurring came to light, and in this particular case, it involved a customer’s vehicle. Thankfully, there were no reported injuries resulting from the deployment. However, similar to the previous incident, there were no apparent reasons for the airbag to have inflated.
Later in the month, Kia repurchased the vehicles and conducted a more thorough examination. Utilizing X-ray inspection, the automaker identified the culprit as the diffuser disk, and interestingly, both problematic disks had been manufactured within a day of each other.
The automaker eventually determined that a diffuser disk setup error at the factory is ultimately what led to this error. It believes that airbags produced by its supplier, Hyundai Mobis, on those two days may be defective, and prone to failure.
Since the 2024 Kia Soul and Selto crossovers use the same side curtain airbag, the automaker is recalling both vehicles. It warns that the randomly inflating airbag could lead to an injury, or distract the driver, and increase the risk of a crash.
In order to prevent that from happening, it will reach out to affected customers starting on January 31. They will be instructed to bring their vehicles in to a nearby dealer, where the airbag module will be inspected, and replaced where necessary.
