Photo: Kia
It's not easy to be a Kia owner these days, and Nikki Peele knows this well. The DC woman, who owns a Kia Soul she (still) doesn't want to let go, is now struggling to recover her car after it got stolen for the second time in 18 months.
If you've been reading the news in the last couple of years, you probably know that a Kia challenge that went viral on social media put a target on the back of nearly every Kia and Hyundai model. The video provided instructions on how to start a vulnerable vehicle in less than a minute, with several Kia and Hyundai models lacking an immobilizer exposed to the glitch.
While not all Hyundais and Kias can be hacked using this method, members of an infamous group called Kia Boys often break into vehicles without even checking the model year.
Nikki Peele's Kia Soul was stolen 18 months ago, and it took her six weeks to get the car back and fix it. This time, she believes it could take several months.
The car was parked in a secure garage in the same building where the woman lives on M Street in Northeast DC. She explained in posts on X (formerly Twitter) that she managed to track down the vehicle using an AirTag that she had previously planted inside, and fortunately, police found it hours later in Maryland.
Since then, the Kia Soul has been sitting in an impound lot.
While the woman is now struggling to find a way to get her car back faster, the most important part of the story is how a vehicle was stolen from a secure parking garage. The woman says she pays $275 per month to park the car in her building, and she even spent extra specifically to make it harder for thieves to drive away in her Soul.
She installed not one but two steering wheel locks as well as a wheel lock. The Kia Soul wears several security stickers, and an AirTag that could help provide location information if it gets stolen. And it did, so this entire anti-theft arsenal didn't do the trick.
Netizens believe it was an inside job, albeit struggling to remove all these security locks for a Kia Soul is definitely a heck of an effort.
Kia provided the typical statement to local media, explaining that it encourages everybody to install the anti-theft update and additional hardware to block thieves from stealing cars. It claims the update has already been installed on 1.2 million vehicles, and everybody can get the patch by visiting a dealer or a software update clinic. The company reminds us that owners of cars not eligible for the software patch can get a free steering wheel lock.
While not all Hyundais and Kias can be hacked using this method, members of an infamous group called Kia Boys often break into vehicles without even checking the model year.
Nikki Peele's Kia Soul was stolen 18 months ago, and it took her six weeks to get the car back and fix it. This time, she believes it could take several months.
The car was parked in a secure garage in the same building where the woman lives on M Street in Northeast DC. She explained in posts on X (formerly Twitter) that she managed to track down the vehicle using an AirTag that she had previously planted inside, and fortunately, police found it hours later in Maryland.
Since then, the Kia Soul has been sitting in an impound lot.
While the woman is now struggling to find a way to get her car back faster, the most important part of the story is how a vehicle was stolen from a secure parking garage. The woman says she pays $275 per month to park the car in her building, and she even spent extra specifically to make it harder for thieves to drive away in her Soul.
She installed not one but two steering wheel locks as well as a wheel lock. The Kia Soul wears several security stickers, and an AirTag that could help provide location information if it gets stolen. And it did, so this entire anti-theft arsenal didn't do the trick.
Netizens believe it was an inside job, albeit struggling to remove all these security locks for a Kia Soul is definitely a heck of an effort.
Kia provided the typical statement to local media, explaining that it encourages everybody to install the anti-theft update and additional hardware to block thieves from stealing cars. It claims the update has already been installed on 1.2 million vehicles, and everybody can get the patch by visiting a dealer or a software update clinic. The company reminds us that owners of cars not eligible for the software patch can get a free steering wheel lock.
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