2025 Kia Telluride1st gen facelift (2023–2025), final year

Updated 2026-09-02NHTSA counts read on this date — 102 complaints. They rise over time.

The 2025 Kia Telluride Is the Best-Selling One Yet. It Also Shuts Off in Traffic.

Kia sold 123,281 Tellurides in 2025, the best year this nameplate has ever had. It took a third consecutive Top Safety Pick+ while IIHS was raising its bar. Second-row side airbags became standard. Oil consumption complaints, which ran 78 on the 2020, hit zero.

Of the 102 complaints owners have filed with NHTSA about this model year, 31 describe the engine shutting off while they were driving.

There is no recall for it. There is no open investigation.

The basics

The last year of the facelift generation. What changed for 2025:

• Second-row side airbags standard across the range
• Highway Driving Assist 1.5 standard
• X-Pro AWD tows 5,500 lbs, up from 5,000, with about 0.4 inches more ground clearance
• X-Line and X-Pro get Terracotta interior, embossed front seats, and a standard 12.3-inch dual-screen display
• Gloss Black roof rails and emblems standard on those trims

Five trims, from LX to SX Prestige, with X-Line and X-Pro variants above them. Pricing started at $36,390 for the LX and ran to $51,390 for the SX Prestige.

Powertrain unchanged for the sixth year: 3.8L V6, 291 hp, 262 lb-ft, eight-speed.

How it was received

Top Safety Pick+ for the third year running, and IIHS tightened its criteria over that period, so holding the award means the car kept up. NHTSA five stars overall. On the tougher side-impact test IIHS added along the way, this car rates Good — the 2020 through 2022 Tellurides rate Marginal, and the structural change came with the 2023 refresh.

That award covers crashworthiness and crash avoidance. It does not test whether an engine keeps running.

What owners filed

NHTSA’s database collects complaints only — nobody files to say the car works. Most 2025 Tellurides aren’t here. But the concentration in this one is unusual.

ENGINE is the top component category on this model year — the only one of the six where that is true. Its biggest showing before this was the 2020, where 106 engine filings ran third and meant oil consumption. It doesn’t mean that here.

The engine shutting off — 31 of 102 complaints

What makes this one different from a scattering of unrelated stalls is that owners keep quoting the same dashboard message. From ODI 11758300:

“Over the course of two days, the engine stalled when decelerating at intersections three different times. The engine died with warning lights on the dash and a message: ‘Engine Off! Shift to P or N then start engine.’ I had to completely stop, shift gears, and then restart the engine”

From ODI 11758317, filed the same day by a different owner:

“This started May 8th and is still going on. Engine randomly shuts down while driving. Vehicle alarms and message says Engine OFF Shift to P or N then start engine. No warning, happens about once a week. Very scary when in traffic and I cannot move because my engine randomly shuts down.”

The pattern in these filings is decelerating or stopped — intersections, traffic — which is where a stall is most likely to leave you sitting in a live lane.

One filing (ODI 11757766) describes something broader on a rental at 29,450 miles:

“the cluster lit with simultaneous failures: electric power steering, electronic parking brake, ABS, stability control disabled, tire pressure monitor”

That’s an electrical fault taking multiple systems at once, not an engine problem in the mechanical sense. Whether it’s the same root cause as the stalls isn’t something the complaint record can answer.

One owner (ODI 11732712) spells out why a stall is not merely inconvenient:

“When the engine turns off, both the braking vacuum system and the power steering go off, making it harder to brake and steer to safety. If I were going highway speeds, this would be a serious safety situation.”

There’s a third thing in the filings that isn’t in the quotes: dealers keep failing to reproduce it. ODI 11735066 is the clearest — the car lost motive power at low speed, the dealer had it, and the failure could not be duplicated. A car that stalls once a week and passes every test at the dealership is a car nobody has diagnosed yet.

Windshields — 14 complaints

The one early problem that never went away, counted as filings that name the windshield and describe it cracking, chipping, spidering, or shattering. Headlights fell 168 to two and oil consumption 78 to zero; windshields have been the first or second largest category in every one of the six model years, including this one. Cracks that owners say arrived without an impact, several of them within weeks of delivery. One car (ODI 11736401) was bought in August 2025 and had three cracks by the time the owner filed.

Driver assistance braking for nothing — three complaints

The adaptive cruise control slows the car with nothing in front of it. From ODI 11709481:

“the vehicle applied the brakes without driver input. The vehicle slowed gradually over several seconds even though there was no vehicle, pedestrian, or obstacle present in front of the vehicle.”

Another owner (ODI 11737856) reports it happening while passing at 70 mph, dropping the car to 45 in the passing lane. Three filings is not a pattern. NHTSA’s own forward-collision group holds five filings on this model year and 28 on the 2024.

Everything else on this model year is thin: ten sunroof filings, five on the transmission, two headlights, one clear coat. Oil consumption is zero. NHTSA files three under service brakes — the brakes themselves, including an ABS event over a pothole.

Those counts overlap and they use different rules, so adding them would give a total more precise than the thing it describes. The table at the top of this page is the version that does add up — NHTSA sorts every complaint into exactly one group there, and engine sits at the top of it with 25. Four filings name the seat back frame recall (26V105000) and say the part isn’t available.

Recalls

The seat motor fire recall, the one that has owners parking outside, runs 2020 through 2024. If you’re looking at a 2025, that particular problem isn’t yours.

Three others do apply:

All three are VIN-specific.

What doesn’t show up in the complaints

Six model years in, the categories that defined the 2020 have thinned to almost nothing — headlights 168 to two, oil consumption 78 to zero. What sits on top now isn’t a wear item or a bad seal. It’s the car shutting itself off.

What the complaint curve says

Filings by calendar year: two in 2024, 23 in 2025, and 77 so far in 2026.

Going up, on the newest car in the lineup, while the other model years here either front-loaded and fell or went quiet and climbed after warranties expired. A model year also has more cars on the road in its second year than its first, and filing counts alone cannot separate that from a rising failure rate.

Some of it is arithmetic — when oil consumption falls from 78 to zero and headlights from 168 to two, whatever is left takes a larger share of a smaller pool by default.

Neither explains the absolute number. Counted the same way, the 2024 model year has eight of these and this one has 31, on a model year with less time on the road. I am not going to turn that into a rate — Kia’s published sales are by calendar year, and they do not divide cleanly into model-year filings — but the gap runs backwards for a newer car.

If you’re looking at one

None of this is a verdict on the car. It’s a Top Safety Pick+ with zero oil complaints that outsold every Telluride before it. It’s where to spend ten minutes.

Half of what follows depends on a seller who has actually driven the car. If it’s a dealer trade-in or an online listing where nobody can answer, start with the two things that don’t need a person: the recall status by VIN, and the service records.

Ask directly about stalling, using the owners’ words. Not “any problems.” Ask whether the car has ever displayed “Engine Off! Shift to P or N then start engine.” That message is what the filings keep quoting. An owner who’s seen it will recognize the phrase immediately.

Ask how often, and where. The filings describe it recurring — one owner says about once a week — and happening while decelerating or stopped. If a seller says it happened once and never again, that’s a different situation than weekly.

Check the service history for a stall diagnosis. Any Kia dealer can pull it with the VIN, and Carfax shows the visits without the detail. Owners in these filings describe dealers unable to reproduce it, so a repair order that says “no fault found” is itself information.

Confirm the seat back frame recall status, in writing. This is a restraint issue, not a convenience one — and four filings say they got the notice and the dealer had no part. So the question isn’t “is it recalled?” It’s “has it been fixed, or is it still waiting on parts?”

Look at the windshield. Fourteen complaints, second only to the stalling — and windshields have ranked first or second in all six model years. Owners describe cracks arriving within weeks of delivery. A replacement on this car needs the camera recalibrated afterwards.

Look up at the sunroof glass. Ten filings describe it shattering on its own, all ten describing the panel coming apart rather than the mechanism failing, and all ten while driving. There is no recall and no inspection that predicts it. Ask whether the glass has ever been replaced and why.

Check the spare. There’s a recall for the wrong one being installed, and it affects ABS and traction control.

Ask whether the adaptive cruise has ever braked on its own. Three filings describe the car slowing hard with nothing in front of it, once in a passing lane at 70. NHTSA’s forward-collision group is 5 here and 28 on the 2024.

Check what’s left of the warranty, and who gets it. Kia’s 10-year/100,000-mile powertrain coverage is for the original owner. A second owner gets 5 years or 60,000 miles, and on a 2025 that runs out sooner than most people assume.

Oil consumption and headlight failure are far lower priorities here — zero and two complaints, against a 2020 where they were the whole story. Neither costs anything to look at.

If it happens to you, file it. NHTSA opens investigations based on complaint volume and pattern, and there is no investigation into this yet. Filing is free at nhtsa.gov.

The end of the line

That’s every model year of the first-generation Telluride, 2020 through 2025.

There is no 2026. Kia skipped the model year entirely, which is unusual enough to be worth saying plainly: the car that spent six years as the benchmark of its segment simply doesn’t exist for one of them. The redesigned second generation arrives as a 2027, with a hybrid, and we’ll start over.

Recalls are per-VIN and free at nhtsa.gov/recalls, which also holds all 102 complaints, searchable by the ODI numbers above.

Sources

• NHTSA complaint database — 102 complaints for the 2025 Telluride, retrieved 2026-09-02
• GoodCarBadCar — Telluride US sales figures
• Kia Media — Telluride earns 2025 IIHS Top Safety Pick+
• Kia Media — 2025 Telluride overview (official)
• Cars.com — 2025 Kia Telluride recalls
• NHTSA — Report a safety problem

Specs and pricing checked against Kia’s media site. Complaint counts and quotes come from NHTSA’s public database, retrieved 2026-09-02, with ODI numbers attached. Model years and calendar sales years don’t align, so complaint rates here are approximate. This summarizes what owners and reviewers reported; it isn’t buying or repair advice.