Takes a lickin', keeps on tickin'

[titantn24]

I'm really tired of seeing the thread "Kia Smells-new girl help please", so I've decided to share my own Kia Sorento story. I'll admit, when someone mentions durability, Kia is not the first thing that comes to my mind. But after this experience, it's close to the top of the list. My wife purchased her '05 Sorento early last December. She traded in her '01 Ford Exploder Sport, I mean Explorer Sport. I was reluctant to purchase a Kia as I would prefer a Honda Pilot, Toyota Highlander, or any other foreign mid-size SUV because they are synominous with reliability. However, for the price, you couldn't beat the Sorento's value. Put the options from a fully loaded EX 4x4 in any of the other brands and your lookin' at 30K+. So anyway, we decided to get the Sorento. Well about 3 weeks later, we were travelling though Virginia to get to North Carolina in the wee hours of Christmas morning. I was a passenger this trip and we were loaded down, complete with the luggage carrier on top. I was watching the outside temerature on the overhead console like a hawk. It was raining a cold drizzle and I knew the closer to 32 degrees we got, the greater the risk we ran of hitting black ice. Well, as we entered into some higher elevation, it happened. From nowhere, we hit a cold patch of air that had frozen the drizzle to create a solid sheet of ice. Withoug warning, we began to skid out of control, going about 45mph. BAM!! Right into the guardrail. The front end passenger side corner looked like an explosion had occured. The bottom of the front fascia was torn off and the fog light was slammed into the windshield washer resevoir. This all happened so fast and I though it was the end. But thankfully everyone was buckeled up, including our 5 yr. old son and 5 month old toy poodle(in his crate). My son was asleep and woke up after the jolt, confused and crying. We had survived. Now a bigger problem. The engine had shut down the fuel line and would not start. There are other vehicles coming behind us who obviously don't realize there is black ice there. They are going to hit it and hit us! Luckily, some good samaritans stopped and took my wife, son, and dog up the road and out of harms way. The husband stayed behind to help me get the Sorento started again. We couldn't find the fuel pump reset switch anywhere. We practically tore that thing apart looking for it. We looked in the manual over and over and couldn't find it. It didn't help that we were sliding all over the place and fearing for our lives. Finally we found it under the hood. Thankfully the hood still opened. We got it reset and that baby fired right up. We got it up the road and off on the shoulder. Some hillbilly cops stopped and said they would tell the state police to come file a report. They didn't even get out of their car. Had to hurry down to the donut shop and get 'em while they were hot and fresh I guess. We waited on the state trooper for almost 3 hours in the dark, cold, scary woods of Virginia. Oh, did I mention we were low on fuel so we couldn't run the engine to run the heat to keep us warm?...yeah So long story short, our Sorento took a hard lick, but it still ticked. The airbags didn't deploy, as they shouldn't have. The radiator didn't bust. All the things that could have left us stranded didn't malfunction. We drove it all the way on to North Carolina. Even though it wasn't much to look at from the front side!...lol So all that stuff they say about Kia's being cheap built isn't true. At least not for the Sorento.