Anna Dekleva said her Kia engine has a defect that caused multiple high-risk situations on the highway. Kia Canada and the dealership are not willing to pay for more than $12,000 in repairs and have led Dekleva to put a stop payment on her loan with Hyundai Finance, with Leggat Kia subsequently repossessing the vehicle.Alicia Wynter/The Globe and Mail
In the spring of 2023, Anna Dekleva was driving 120 kilometres an hour in the passing lane of the Queen Elizabeth Way, a major highway in Southern Ontario, when the engine lights flickered, oil lights came on and the car began to shake violently.
Within seconds, the 2017 Kia Sorento EX Turbo she had purchased just two months earlier had decelerated to 60 kilometres an hour as cars zoomed past, narrowly missing her.
“This thing was shaking so bad that I literally thought it was going to explode,” Ms. Dekleva said. “I thought that’s it. … I said, ‘Please, Lord, just get me to the next town.’”
While she eventually made it home safely, it wasn’t the first or last time the car would stall, shake or otherwise malfunction, including at high speeds. The Berkeley, Ont., resident ultimately needed to replace her engine and spend a total of $12,659.19 maintaining and repairing the car over the span of two years.
Both the manufacturer and Leggat Kia, the Burlington, Ont., dealership where she purchased the car, refused to pay for necessary tests and repairs, citing the high mileage on her vehicle and the fact it was no longer under warranty.
In the past, Ms. Dekleva may have been able to seek recourse in court. But this avenue has shrunk in recent years and all but closed after an Ontario Court of Appeal decision in May.
Lawyers who spoke with The Globe and Mail say the North v. BMW ruling applied case law from the Supreme Court of Canada to hold that owners of cars with defects that expose drivers and passengers to danger do not have any claim against a manufacturer when the car is damaged or destroyed by the defect – unless there’s physical injury or damage to property other than the car itself.
The ruling interpreted previous case law to mean that claims in negligence − accusing a manufacturer of selling a car that is unsafe − are limited to costs incurred by drivers to avert future danger, said James Sayce, a class-action lawyer at Koskie Minsky LLP in Toronto.
“If you are travelling at high speeds on the highway and your car sort of self-destructs, that’s not something that’s recoverable in Ontario any more − even if there is some sort of defect with the car that is the fault of the manufacturer,” Mr. Sayce said.
The recent Ontario appellate court decision will have significant consequences for product liability in the province, he said.
While it wasn’t always easy in the past for consumers to sue for “pure economic loss,” it will now be nearly impossible.
The North v. BMW case that led to the ruling involved a group of BMW owners seeking to bring a class-action lawsuit against the manufacturer, claiming that the engines in their cars had a common defect that could cause the engine to fail catastrophically and suddenly, leading to loss of power and control of the vehicle.
But none of them had been injured, and their cars did not damage other property. The court rejected the lawsuit and overturned the class action’s certification, saying the losses were “purely economic” and therefore unrecoverable, citing two previous cases that made it up to the Supreme Court.
Before the North v. BMW decision, if a product such as a car had a dangerous defect – an engine that would “catastrophically implode,” for example, as in the BMW case – affected consumers had a greater chance of making a successful claim.
Courts often accepted these claims when the car either damaged itself or was considered “inherently dangerous,” even if the driver wasn’t physically hurt, said David Wingfield, who was on the legal counsel team for the appellants in North v. BMW Court of Appeal case.
He said the Court of Appeal decision in May changed that. Today, consumers are caught in a catch-22: If they are unlucky enough to be injured because of the defect, they can be compensated for their injury. But if they avoid injury, they are out of luck.
“This ruling gives manufacturers an incentive to produce unsafe products because it will be cheaper for them to pay for any injury caused by their product than to fix the defect or replace the dangerous product,” Mr. Wingfield said. “This is not how our negligence law is supposed to work.”
Danielle Royal, a lawyer at Stikeman Elliott LLP who represents defendants in product liability class actions, said “all defendants are looking closely at this case, looking at what has been claimed in class actions commenced against their clients.”
What the courts are saying is “lawsuits aren’t the way to deal with this,” Mr. Sayce said. Consumers must rely on warranties or direct dealings with manufacturers.
In many cases, such as Ms. Dekleva’s, this isn’t easy.
After spending thousands of dollars in repairs and maintenance, her vehicle stalled once again in January. The mechanic recommended a full engine replacement costing more than $7,000.
While Leggat Kia confirmed the diagnosis, the company refused to offer her a loaner or warranty support, claiming the issue wasn’t covered. (Kia Canada spokesperson Susan Iorfida said an engine replacement is outside Kia Canada’s five-year, 100,000-kilometre warranty.)
Ms. Dekleva would later learn that her vehicle’s Theta II two-litre turbocharged engine was prone to a defect that became the subject of a class action. That lawsuit was settled in 2020.
Joseph Capriotti, general manager at Leggat Kia, said Ms. Dekleva’s case was an “outlier” because she bought the vehicle used, with a little more than 200,000 kilometres on it, and claims she did not perform regularly scheduled maintenance on the car.
Ms. Dekleva categorically denies this. Documents seen by The Globe show she had at least 12 synthetic oil changes and two transmission flushes done between January, 2023, and January, 2025, among other maintenance procedures.
While high mileage can give dealers more leverage in disputing complaints like Ms. Dekleva’s, mechanic Rui Silvestre said he’s seen the same type of engine failure in Kias with mileage ranging from 50,000 to 200,000 kilometres – with many owners getting their engine replacement reimbursed.
“These engines are just prone to it, and unfortunately, there’s sometimes no stopping it, it’s just a matter of time,” said the owner of My Neighbourhood Mechanic in Toronto. “These engines have been failing at a very high rate.”
Ms. Dekleva’s complaints to the Ontario Motor Vehicle Industry Council and Transport Canada have gone unresolved. (They confirmed that they either investigated or were investigating the complaint.)
While she says she has never defaulted on a loan in the past, she put a stop payment on her loan with Hyundai Finance, and Leggat Kia subsequently repossessed the vehicle.