Easier than prosecuting car thieves or getting their DAs to actually do their jobs
Kia and Hyundai are not doing their due diligence and being both incredibly lazy and incredibly cheap here. They should be strong-armed into catching up with the rest of the industry.
And if they had, people would be on here complaining about evil corporate greed because it costs $300 to duplicate and program a transponder key.
The programming procedure using a scan tool took 5 minutes.
Has this changed? It cost zero dollars to program a transponder key last time I did (20ish years ago), since the instructions for doing so were in the car manual. It was some weird dance where you need two already-programmed keys and turn them in the ignition to specific positions in a specific order.
Some cars (notably Hondas) do not let you self-program keys; rather it must be done with a scan tool.
The era of push-button start has ushered in crazy-expensive key fobs.
As the other poster pointed out, vehicles that do allow self-programming generally require two known keys present to program a third. Most people don't realize this until they've lost one of the two OEM keys.
Could we say the same about the police not capturing and putting those stealing cars away?
Why is it Kia’s fault people are choosing to break the law?
Noble intentions but it ultimate creates injustice for victims of the crime. It also promotes petty and organized crime. It also creates a cycle. Soft on crime cause a crime wave caused by social justice DAs. Voters get pissed and then only vote for Tough on Crime candidates. Tough on Crime candidates crack down on crime creating a sense of injustice. The sense of injustice pisses off Voters and they vote for Social Justice candidates who are soft on crime and the cycle repeats.
Meanwhile there are a near unlimited number of potential car thieves. Throwing one in jail does just about nothing for the next person in line willing to steal the car.