How Kia Motors Endangers Lives in Nigeria

Until very recently, Sola Akinsanya’s dream car had been the Kia brand. “I just love the Kia cars because they come at affordable rates and they are truly good looking,” he said. But that has since changed.

How Kia Motors Endangers Lives in NigeriaIf you ever thought that driving a brand new car was enough assurance that your car has an airbag then you may need to have a rethink especially if you are driving a Kia motors brand sold in Nigeria .Adejuwon SoyinkaUntil very recently, Sola Akinsanya’s dream car had been the Kia brand. “I just love the Kia cars because they come at affordable rates and they are truly good looking,” he said. But that has since changed.Akinsanya’s desire for any car in the Kia brand range took a flight on April 14. On that day, the fresh university graduate saw something that deeply questioned his love and desire for the Kia brand. It was a shocker. It came in the form of an accident. The accident involved a Kia Rio, one of the popular cars dotting the Nigerian landscape. As a low budget car, the Rio attracts a lot of young upwardly mobile Nigerians who would rather save up and purchase the car brand new than put their money on a second hand vehicle.Akinsanya belonged to this category until he saw the accident involving a Kia Rio in the Ogba area of Lagos on April 14. For Akinsanya, the most disturbing side to the accident was not the involvement of a Kia car. Rather, it was the shocking discovery that the brand new car did not come with a functional airbag.“This safety compromise is a very dangerous one. It’s bad enough that Kia is a very weak and fragile brand – now they don’t even care about safety? It’s not fair at all,” he says. He is not alone in expressing this concern. Bola Ogunsanya is equally worried. His worry stems from the fact that he once bought a Kia Optima, otherwise referred to as “the chairman” in Nigeria, only to discover after a while that the car which is supposed to be a premium offering from Kia motors in Nigeria did not come with an airbag.“To think that in this age and time somebody will bring a supposed brand new car without an airbag into this country is almost unbelievable. In fact, I would not have believed it if it had not happened to me personally,” Ogunsanya states.But for Francis Akanya, a motor dealer in Lagos, scenarios like this do not come as a surprise. “I know that there are some dealers and car lots that sell that same Rio “brand new” for a fraction of the price of the new one. The one without an airbag could have come from one of such places,” he reasons.Akanya adds that “we all know that just like with other brands like Honda and Toyota, some dealers have ways of getting the ‘brand new’ of these vehicles, which are of course arranged stripped down models of the real thing.He may be right. But, perhaps, even more shocking is the fact that some of the Kia brands sold by Dana Motors, the authorised dealer of Kia brands in Nigeria, still do not come with basic safety fittings like the airbag. M2 investigations reveal that the popular Kia Optima which is one of the premium ranges sold in Nigeria does not come with airbags. While Kia cars sold to other markets around the world go with the full compliments of safety features like airbags, the same cannot be said of the ones that are sold in the Nigerian market.As far as Jonas Agwu, Lagos Sector commander, Federal Road Safety Commission, FRSC, is concerned, this is indeed unthinkable. Agwu says it is totally inconceivable for anyone to produce a car in this age and time without such basic safety features as an airbag, among others.But the Standards Organisation of Nigeria differs slightly on this. Rilwan Fashina, public relations officer, SON, is of the view that airbags belong to the class of additional safety features. “The standards for automobiles worldwide factor in safety and performance as critical parameters to determine their quality. Thus many safety devices are fitted into automobiles depending on their grade and class e.g. fog lights, speed limit alerts, the seat belts, ABS among others. These comfort, design and aesthetics among others also play major roles in determining quality of automobiles and their class and price. I am aware that not all automobiles are fitted with airbags because they are an additional safety feature; on the other hand, some automobiles are fitted with more airbags than others also as added safety feature,” he says.With this statement, the SON spokesperson appears to have also spoken for Dana Motors. Responding to enquiries from M2, Dana Motors says, “Yes we do have vehicles without airbags  however, it’s a choice the customer has to make, and that choice comes at a price.” Fred Oriunuebho of Mylestone Public Relations, PR managers of Dana Motors, while speaking on behalf of the company, adds that “If you notice, airbags are SRS, meaning Secondary Restraint System. Note the word secondary. This means airbags are a secondary safety option, the first being your seat belts, brakes, crash pads and crumple zone.”Oriunuebho asserts that the issue of the Kia Motors brand being sub-standard as a result of this does not arise “because there are various models of the same car. Some come with as many as six airbags while others come with two or none.” He explains that “this is to ensure that customers can get the same car at a price that suits them. It’s now left for the customer to acquire what they can afford. It is just the same way you have full option models of a car with leather seats, alloy wheels e.t.c and the lower option models of the same car with cloth seat e.t.c.”   As brilliant as this explanation sounds, what Oriunuebho however fails to add is the fact that advertisements put forward by Dana Motors for these cars are not explicit about the availability or otherwise of the airbags. This perhaps explains why many people have ended up buying or even just driving certain brands of Kia cars without being fully aware of their airbag status.And with the kind of response from SON, experiences like that of Akinsanya and Ogunsanya may also not prompt a recall of such vehicles like recent experiences in Europe have proven. Recently, Kia Motors announced a recall of some Cee’d and Picanto models that it said required remedial work in order to avoid possible safety issues.In that instance, Kia said it had discovered up to 468 Cee’d models that could suffer from insufficient brake force from the master cylinder especially on vehicles featuring Electronic Stability Programme systems. Kia Motors (UK) therefore contacted the owners of the 468 Cee’d five-door, SW and three-door vehicles built between 1 April 2008 and 30 March 2009, to arrange for work to be carried out to replace the brake master cylinder. The company said the recall exercise will be done at no cost to the affected customers. This is inspite of the fact that the company claims it is not aware of any accidents that have occurred in the UK because of this issue.In the case of Picanto, harsh 2009-2010 weather conditions revealed that where high levels of de-icing materials have been used there is a possibility that material in the fuel-filler neck seal could be damaged and a fuel leak could occur. As a result of this, the owners of 6,585 Picantos built between November 2009 and February 2010 were contacted to arrange for the fuel-filler neck of their cars to be replaced free of charge. The company said it was aware of a small number of instances of a leak occurring.But with a regulatory agency like SON explaining the absence of airbags away as optional, chances of Nigerians getting any reprieve for inadvertently buying a brand new car without airbags in 2010 may very well be considered a long foregone conclusion.