Pobody’s nerfect, a my mom’s coffee cup like to remind me every morning as a kid. We’ve all made mistakes at work. However, not many of us have made errors that could kill someone under certain circumstances. Kia issued a recall for 22,883 Kia EV9 SUVs from the 2024 and 2025 model years due to missing seat mounting bolts. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s recall report states that “a plant assembly worker” caused the error, a massive blunder for a single person at the Korean automaker to commit.
The report makes it clear that it wasn’t simply a bad day at work. All the impacted vehicles were built at the Kia Autoland Gwangmyeong assembly plant in South Korea. The recall includes EV9s produced between September 25, 2023 and October 15, 2024, a period stretching over a year. I can’t imagine the horror that lone worker felt when they realized that they were in fact the problem.
The impacted EV9 SUVs may have mounting bolts missing from the second and third-row seats. The seats could come loose during a crash, completely removing the benefits of wearing a seat belt. Owners may be able to identify the flaw if they hear the seats rattling or if the seats are noticeably loose. Futurism noted:
According to a chronology report filed with the NHTSA, the issue was first raised in a customer complaint back in September. In an inspection of 90 randomly selected EV9 SUVs performed by Kia North America, no loose or missing seat mounting bolts were found.
Subsequent inspections uncovered only three total cases of missing seat bolts — all leading back to the same employee, apparently, as of mid-December. And so in reality, the issue may be far less pervasive than the size of the recall suggests, though you can never be too careful.
How did this worker’s errors go unnoticed for so long? Despite the speed of final assembly, the mass production of a car is still a monumental task. Industrial efforts at this scale move (and meltdown) at a glacial pace. It’s the reason why the day a car rolls off the line doesn’t impact its build quality despite the widely spread myth about the sloppy quality of vehicles assembled on Mondays and Fridays.