2026 Kia Sportage Gasoline - Recurring Dead Battery Issue Confirmed
Just wanted to share my experience so far in case anyone else runs into something similar.
I have a 2026 Sportage that started having random dead battery / no-start issues. Got a new lease Nov 2025. The weird part is that it’s extremely intermittent. Sometimes the car sits for days and starts perfectly fine, other times the battery is completely dead overnight.
So far the car has been towed to the dealership 4 times for the same issue and spent over a month total out of service combined. The car is literally 6 months old only.
The dealership repeatedly said they couldn’t reproduce the issue. No codes, battery tests fine, etc. Super frustrating because the issue is obviously real, but intermittent electrical problems are hard to prove.
The interesting part is that during the latest visit, they told me Kia engineering believes Kia Connect / phone proximity features may be waking modules up and causing battery drain. They said an update is supposedly in the works, but for now they disabled Kia Connect entirely on my vehicle as a workaround.
So basically:
“we don’t have a fix yet, please stop using one of the advertised features of the car.”
At this point Kia corporate escalated the case to a regional manager and started a buyback review process. Still waiting on the final outcome.
I’ll say this though — document EVERYTHING.
Dates
Mileage
Days out of service
Tow history
Every phone call
Every service invoice
The paper trail matters a lot more than I expected.
Curious if anyone else has experienced something similar with Kia Connect or parasitic battery drain issues recently.