In hot areas they do. AC reliability is a serious decision maker in vehicle buying decision in hot geographies.

Drivetrain failures on modern cars are much less common, ICE or EV. Reliability nowadays is mostly about things like AC and all the tech on the cars. I’ve had friends lemon cars over rattling and squeak or radio cutting off randomly, that service wasn’t able to fix.

My car is reliable, as in, it drives, applies nowadays mostly to old beaters, that you buy only to drive and fix anything with a duct tape.

Same here: I would prefer Tesla to rate well on reliability but I can also tell you that in the mid-80s I spent many an hour explaining to a recent Detroit transplant that American car manufacturing quality needs serious improvent and that, no, Japanese quality isn't better mainly because of Japanese government support. Japan took our own Deming seriously; we didn't.

Kia isn't Japanese. And Toyota has had problems since their zienth mid 90s. So nobody has got a lock on this. But one has gotta stay after it