2023 Kia Carnival Pricing and Specs

Some oil consumption is normal for engines, and modern engines seem to use a little more than some older designs. That's because modern engines are designed with low-friction piston rings which are great for fuel economy but can lead to slightly higher oil consumption. However, 700ml per 1000km does seem high for what is not an especially high-performance engine, and one that has not travelled very far in the scheme of things.

It wouldn't be the first time a dealer (of any brand) has tried to fob off a customer concern with such a response, so I reckon you're on the right track by contacting Kia Australia's customer service division. I'd also follow up with a phone call as well as an email, but experience suggests Kia is one company that takes customer satisfaction seriously.

Your car is still covered by the factory seven-year warranty, so provided it's been serviced correctly, if there is a fault, it should be covered. Further investigation is warranted, including a compression and leak-down test to show if there's any deterioration in the performance of the engine's piston rings. Your local state motoring club is a good source for these tests, particularly as manufacturers tend to take the clubs and their mechanical inspections seriously.

This is precisely why I loathe the typical aftermarket warranties dished up by used-car yards. They are written very carefully to cover the stuff that won’t go wrong, and not cover the things that typically do fail or break. It’s often been said that these warranties are not worth the paper they’re written on, and here’s proof yet again.

What does it matter if the engine failure was caused by a radiator that is blocked, broken, cracked or leaking? The bottom line is that a dud radiator (sold with the rest of the car) appears to have caused the car to overheat and destroy its engine. And yet the fine print of this warranty will allow the warranty company to wriggle out its responsibility to repair an engine it accepted money to cover. The ACCC should get involved in this grubby end of the car trade and sort it out. Now.

As for your friend, I’m not sure what can be done. Allowing somebody with the right legal background to read the warranty might be a good idea. But the used-car dealers who profit from these warranties know the fine print backwards. And I suspect that even if the blocked radiator exclusion hadn’t scuppered her warranty cover, the fact that a previous owner did his own servicing (and therefore, no stamped service book) would have been an alternative get-out for the warranty company. Actually, that’s a thought: If the service book wasn’t fully stamped, should the warranty have even been offered when the car was sold? I’d be asking that of the car-yard.

I’d also be asking who diagnosed the radiator as the problem. If your friend noticed coolant disappearing but not leaking on to the ground, I’d say that was more consistent with a blown head gasket – for which these early Carnivals were infamous. Find out if a blown head gasket is covered in the warranty. If it is, I’d be very suspicious about blaming the radiator. And yes, I’m absolutely suggesting that you’re potentially being lied to about the cause of the engine failure to move the official reason into an area not covered by the warranty. I reckon I’d be having the RACQ (which has a fair bit of clout in these matters) inspect the engine and rule on what caused the meltdown.

Meantime, forget about a $7000 engine. Find a parts recycler (we used to call them wrecking yards) that specialises in second-hand engines and get a good, tested, used engine fitted. Just make sure it doesn’t have the same head gasket problem.

What does GUV stand for? Glad you asked. GUV is a relatively new term on the motoring landscape and, in bald terms, stands for Grand Utility Vehicle. The broad view is that it was an acronym first coined by Kia to describe its current-model Carnival on the basis that it was a step up in luxury from the average SUV and, therefore, needed a grander name; literally, Grand Utility Vehicle.

Like a lot of marketing, of course, the name is more or less meaningless when it comes to being an actual descriptor for the vehicle in question. Yes, the Carnival is well equipped and luxurious for a family vehicle, but 'Grand'? Grammatically, there’s also scope to interpret the vehicle as having a grand level of utility which, given its eight-seat capacity and family friendliness it arguably achieves. Beyond that, however, the definition is rooted purely in the imaginations of the marketing department. Searching for more GUV meaning than that is unlikely to expand the sum of human knowledge.

But now that Kia has slipped the genie from the bottle, you can expect to see the GUV tag applied to all sorts of vehicles formerly known as SUVs, both large and small, and both in Australia and globally. It’s also likely that the vehicles to adopt the GUV tag will be high-end versions of more prosaic SUVs, and there’s a good chance that the prestige brands might introduce the term to their brochures as well.

That said, GUV could also disappear without a trace. The same thing happened to Toyota’s AUV (Action Utility Vehicle) tag a few years ago which was applied to variants of the HiLux range. But the AUV moniker has since been reclaimed by the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle industry which builds unmanned submarines to explore the undersea environment.

There’s another reason GUV could disappear from car advertising and marketing: In the US, rising fuel prices have forced older, gas-guzzling SUVs into the driveways of a poorer demographic who can’t afford anything more efficient. At which point, as Urban Dictionary points out, the term GUV was coined to describe the 'Ghetto Utility Vehicle'.