What appears to be new twist on e-mail lottery scams—well, new to me at least—arrived in my inbox recently.
Besides a bunch of cash, it said I won a Kia.
These would-be e-mail scammers could not have picked a worse vehicle to try and get me to bite on their scam. My wife and I once owned a Kia.
Ever notice you don’t see many old Kia’s on the road?
I suspect I may know why.
Some of the following appeared in a column three years ago. For the sole person who may remember it, I apologize.
We leased a Kia Sportage for five years [we know, too long] and when the lease came up in 2005 we decided to buy it because we were way over the contract on mileage and it had been trouble-free for 60,000 miles.
Less than a month after we bought it—I’m not kidding; not even a month went by—it broke down and cost about $2,000 for repairs. Several weeks later, it broke down again at a cost of another $2,000 or so. And some weeks after that, it broke down again…and as before, the repairs were in the $2,000 range.
After the third breakdown—each mechanically unrelated to the other—we decided to unload the Kia and cut our quickly mounting losses. We found a Honda Pilot we liked and told the salesman we were prepared to buy the following weekend. He offered us a $4,000 trade-in on the Sportage and we shook hands on the deal.
We drove away in the Kia relieved that we'd be rid of it in a week. Then, as we were driving up over a mountain on New York Route 17 to our house in the Catskills, a grinding sound began to come from the engine.
“Don't you think you ought to pull over?” asked my wife.
“No, dammit. We need to get to the house,” I responded as if I could will it over the top.
As the grinding grew louder, the temperature gauge buried itself on “high” and the car began to lose power. We had to pull over.
This was the third time the Sportage stranded us on a Northeastern highway that summer. The two other times involved hundreds of dollars in towing fees.
Once on the side of Route 17, the Kia began to emit billows of steam from under its hood.
As cars whizzed by us four feet away at 70 miles per hour in 90-degree heat, I began to pound my fists on the steering wheel: “I [POUND] CAN'T [POUND] FRIGGIN' [POUND] BELIEVE [POUND] THIS! I [POUND] HATE [POUND] THIS [POUND] FRIGGIN' [POUND] CAR [POUND, POUND, POUND]!
Then my son—two years old at the time—began to cry in his car seat.
Nice job, dad, I thought. Now you've scared Max.
“It's OK, buddy. Daddy's just a little frustrated. I'm OK now. Everything will be fine,” I said.
So we called Triple-A for the third time in two months. This time the Sportage was finished. The engine had spun a bearing and the car had to be junked. And the warranty ran out at 60,000 miles, just two months before.
Counting the trade-in money we didn't get, that car popped us for $10,000 in about 60 days, and dropped dead—after we bought it for $11,000.
We had inherited some money before the agonizing summer of the Kia’s long, slow dance of death, so the fiasco didn’t bankrupt us. But needless to say, we did have other things we could have done with that 21 grand.
And boy, are we scarred. Not scared. Scarred. As in: “will never be completely healed.”
To this day, every time my wife and I see a Kia we make hex signs at it and hiss. And on the rare occasions when we see a Sportage that appears to be the vintage of our old one, we yell “run for your lives!”
Then we rehash the summer of ‘05…again.
Her: Man, did you believe that thing?
Me: Nope.
Her: For 60,000 miles. Five years and not one problem.
Me: And then we decided to buy it.
Her: And blam! Ka ching! Ka ching! Ka ching!
Me: No kidding.
Her: You never see those old Sportages on the road anymore.
Me: Nope. We can’t have been the only ones.
Her: Nope, can’t have.
Yes, we are so thoroughly traumatized that we still need to cope by thinking others must have suffered.
And even if I were naive enough to respond to an e-mail lottery scam, I certainly wouldn’t bite on one involving a Kia. I’d be too afraid the car would eat up my winnings.
