In December 2020, Kia filed a recall with NHTSA — campaign 20V750, Kia's own number SC200 — for "an engine compartment fire [that] can occur while driving." The named cause: excessive wear on a connecting-rod bearing in the 2.0-liter GDI four-cylinder, caused by debris left in the engine during manufacturing that restricted oil flow. The recall bundled several nameplates and engine generations together, but two of them — the 2014–2015 Kia Soul and 2014–2015 Kia Forte — are the ones built on the 2.0L Nu GDI at the center of the defect. We pulled the NHTSA engine-complaint record for exactly those four model-year rows: 1,277 engine complaints, clustering between roughly 86,000 and 105,000 miles.
A rod bearing is a thin shell of metal between a connecting rod and the crankshaft — it's what lets the rod spin freely on the crank while riding on a microscopic film of oil pressure. Starve that film, even briefly, and the bearing wears unevenly instead of smoothly. Kia's finding was that manufacturing debris near the crankshaft was doing exactly that: partially blocking the oil passage to the bearing from the day the engine left the factory. Wear that should take 150,000 miles to accumulate happens in a fraction of that, and a spun or failed rod bearing can, in the worst case, punch through the block wall and dump hot oil onto a hot exhaust manifold — the fire risk in Kia's own recall language.
What the failure feels like
Owners report a knock or tap from the bottom of the engine that gets louder with RPM — the classic sound of a bearing that's lost its clearance. Some describe a rattling or metallic knock specifically at startup that fades as oil pressure builds, which is often the earliest, cheapest-to-catch version of this. Left alone, it progresses to a persistent knock under load, a check-engine or oil-pressure light, and in a meaningful number of NHTSA reports, a sudden loss of power or a full stall — sometimes on the highway. Kia's own recall language adds the failure mode that makes this a safety recall rather than a reliability complaint: an oil leak from a failed bearing reaching a hot exhaust surface can start an engine-compartment fire.
The recall covers more than these two cars — we've already covered the rest
Campaign 20V750 is broader than the Soul and Forte. Kia's own filing names "2012–2013 Sorento, 2012–2015 Forte and Forte Koup, 2011–2013 Optima Hybrid, 2014–2015 Soul, and 2012 Sportage" — one combined recall covering more than one engine generation. The Sorento, Optima and Sportage years in that list carry the earlier Theta II engine, the same rod-bearing-failure family we covered at length in The Theta II Decade. What's specific to the 2014–2015 Soul and Forte is the newer 2.0L Nu GDI — a different engine, same failure mode, same manufacturing-debris root cause, and the same recall campaign number. We've scoped this piece to the Nu-GDI years so the numbers here aren't double-counting the Theta II piece's totals.
The mileage window
Across the four rows, median failure mileage runs from 86,000 miles (2015 Forte) to 104,500 miles (2014 Soul) — the 2015 Soul and 2014 Forte land in between, at 94,000 and roughly 99,000. The middle half of reports on any given row falls mostly between 70,000 and 130,000 miles. That's meaningfully later than a manufacturing-debris defect might suggest — this isn't a bearing that fails off the lot, it's one that wears down over the first several years of normal driving and then goes. For a used-car shopper, it means a Soul or Forte from these years with 80,000–100,000 miles on it is arriving right at the point where the complaint record gets loud.
What to do if you own one, or are about to
Check whether the recall was actually performed. This is the single most useful thing you can do, and it costs nothing. Recall repairs are free for the life of the vehicle, tied to the VIN, not the owner — so it doesn't matter if you're the third owner or bought it last week. Run the VIN through NHTSA's recall lookup before you buy, or if you already own one. If campaign 20V750 shows open on your VIN, get it into a Kia dealer; the inspection and any engine work are free.
Listen cold. A rod-bearing knock is usually most audible on a cold start, before oil pressure fully builds, and quiets as the engine warms. If you're test-driving a used Soul or Forte from these years, let it idle from a fully cold start before you even get in.
Don't assume "recalled" means "already fixed." Recall completion rates on any campaign are well under 100%, especially years later on a used car that's changed hands. A recall notice on file is not the same thing as a repair on file — ask for the service record, not just the campaign number.
How we did it
Source. NHTSA engine-category owner-complaint counts and failure mileage for the 2014–2015 Kia Soul and Forte, from our copy of the public NHTSA complaint database (re-validated against the current snapshot on September 24, 2026). These are the exact model-year and nameplate combinations tied to the 2.0L Nu GDI portion of recall campaign 20V750 (Kia's internal number SC200, component category ENGINE, report received December 2, 2020, remedy begun January 27, 2021). The four rows total 1,277 engine complaints; every row clears at least 73 mileage-tagged reports, and the 2015 Soul clears 348. The recall record itself — campaign number, filing date, defect and remedy language — is drawn directly from our local recalls table, sourced from NHTSA's public recall filings.
Caveat. NHTSA files complaints by model, not by engine, so "engine" is a category that can include more than the rod-bearing failure specifically — it can include any owner-filed engine complaint on that model and year. The powertrain/engine category here is model-level, not component-isolated. Complaint counts also reflect how often owners file a report, not a measured failure rate, and are unverified consumer accounts. Kia's own recall filing groups several engine generations and nameplates under one campaign number; we've limited our complaint analysis to the two nameplates built on the 2.0L Nu GDI specifically, to avoid conflating them with the earlier Theta II engine already covered in a separate piece.