Kia: A story of Technical Debt
If you run a business, is the IT department a cost or a benefit?
Well, it’s both … the trouble is that some businesses try to minimize the cost and thereby lose the benefits of the technology for their business.
My latest example of this is from Kia, the South Korean car company where I bought my last car (from a semi-local dealer, not from South Korea).
There’s nothing wrong structurally or design-wise about the car at all; it’s probably the safest car I’ve ever driven … I had heard of heads-up displays in airplanes, but this car had a heads-up display that shows the current speed limit on the windshield.
Slick! I was enjoying the car up until December 13 of this year, when I was parked outside a government building and when I got back to the car some twit had parked 1 micrometer from me and (I’m not sure if this parking job had something to do with it or not), the car would not shift out of neutral.
I called Kia who had it towed … it took me until two days before Christmas to figure out who the tow company was and then I had to upfront the cash to the tow company: $2380! This took most of my entire paycheck for that week … but I thought … well, insurance will cover this and I’ll get the car back .. probably the day after Christmas …
Not so … Today is January 18, and I still don’t have the car back.
I called and called and called … again today … the local Kia dealership isn’t very good at returning calls either. But on one of my several trips over there somebody finally leaked “uh, our KiaConnect system is down” and “without that running we don’t know how to fix the EVs.”
Sheesh.
I would have thought that somebody’s pager would have gone off and they’d have fixed this quickly, but maybe South Korean business has something to do with it.
Overall though, I wish I’d bought a Tesla … or another Subaru Solterra like I got my wife.
Actually I leased it and just am going to let it go at the end of the lease and get a fuel cell car, when the hydrogen infrastructure should be everywhere by then.
