Rob’s Painful Holiday Plauge: Urgent Car Issues Mess WIth Vacation

We were supposed to be in Chicago last week, but our trip was scuttled by whatever cold or flu is making people miserable. I spent Monday and Tuesday on the couch, then returned to the office with a snout full of snot and a bag of cough drops, looking forward to the rescheduled vacation next week. I even managed to get a new set of tires on the car, which I wanted to do before the end of the year. Then IT happened.

What's it you say? The check engine light in my Kia Soul came on. Yet it's worse, it came on and started blinking. The blinking check engine light isn't the check engine light you ignore. It's what I call the f-around and find-out light.

So here I find myself five days before vacation, with the vehicle we were going to Chicago in, essentially dead in the water. Thanks to Rick Ball Ford Lincoln on South Limit and Cable Dahmer Kia in Lee's Summit, I know what's happening with the car, but there is no clear resolution yet.

The short version of the story is I bought the car in 2015, and it ran great until about two and a half years ago. The engine started consuming oil, and with my moving around and having various places do oil changes on it, by the time a mechanic realized I had some oil consumption issues, it was too late to save the engine.

Knowing that some of Kia's engines had this problem, I hoped a recall would cover the failure—no such luck. The failure occurred somewhere else in the engine. The timing was horrible, too, coming out of the pandemic. I considered trading it in then, but money was tight, and the used car market was awful. So, I opted to spend the coin on a new engine.

Then came the stories about how Kias are easy to steal. This past summer, after paying $60 to garage the car in downtown Chicago during a visit, the Kia boys tried to rip it off. They didn't notice the bright yellow club I was using or the stickers Kia had plastered all over the windows that said, yes, I had the theft protection updates done. They didn't get the car; they just did a couple of grand in body damage trying to get into it.

So yes, when the f-around and find out light started blinking, can you blame me for getting a bit of anxiety?

So why is my check engine light flashing? It's a knock sensor, which Kia says might indicate it needs a new motor, a computer upgrade, or a new Knock Sensor. Bad knock sensors are also a known issue, along with motor issues and Kias being easy to steal.

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All this leaves me wondering what's next. A rod-bearing clearance test will tell us if the motor's still good. If it passes that, which it should, Kia thinks it's the sensor or the car's computer. Those fixes aren't inordinately expensive, yet it all begs the question: How much more money do I want to keep dumping into this car?

Will this be solved quickly enough to make tracks for Chicago, or will I be in the office next week, still sorting everything out? At least, the good news is that I didn't go for the nonrefundable hotel room in Chicago. I've got that going for me.