Main Character of the Week is a weekly column that tells you the most prominent “main character” online (good or bad). It runs on Fridays in the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter. If you want to get this column a day before we publish it, subscribe to web_crawlr, where you’ll get the daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
The internet is a stage, and someone unwillingly stumbles onto it weekly. This makes them the “main character” online. Sometimes their story is eye-opening, like this United Airlines flight attendant saying we are all worried about the wrong things on an airplane, but usually it’s a gaffe. In any case, that main character energy flows through the news cycle and turbo-charges debate for several business days.
Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
It’s Kia customers. One said Kia sold her car without consent, the other said they bought a car from Kia and were asked to give it back because the customer wanted it. We reported the stories separately but I just realized they’re probably related.
Kia went from a derided car brand that was perceived as relatively unreliable in the ‘90s to stable, sleeper values that offer Toyota quality at a lower price point. Here in Austin, Texas, I know three different bass players who swear by their Kia Souls and use it to haul their rigs.
The Kia driver is a bold thinker whom you can talk into an Optima when they’re looking for a nice sedan. It’s become a trusted millennial brand… Until 2023 when a common trick was exposed and several were stolen due to a loophole in their construction.
Suddenly, Kias and Hyundais with push button engines were being hacked in the driveway as “Kia Boyz” pranksters went for joyrides. You’ve surely heard of this as it’s become folklore on the Internet.
Yet the car remains incredibly popular because the South Korean model is well-built, sturdy, modern, and affordable to many Americans.
Which explains why a new fear was unlocked to us as American consumers when a customer bought a 2023 Telluride and was then asked to return it.
This is really a story about a shady dealership. The dealership told her they wanted it returned because it was accidentally used as part of a trade-in with an elderly driver who wound up with an electric car she did not understand. This was apparently a lie.
What had happened was that the dealership sold her the car while it was still the property of the seller. This story has a fun meet-cute when, via VIN, the new and old Telluride drivers meet.
But yeah if I buy a used car I’m not returning it because I got a deal and there was a clerical error.
And apparently a malfunction was involved too. We know this because we got a real Beowulf and Grendel situation: The same saga was told via another viral TikTok from the other perspective.
“The most surprising thing about the situation was just how this all came about. The dealership, instead of just being honest to Brooke about why they needed to return the car, made up some weird scenario that the previous owner didn’t like technology,” Tom, one of the third-party pundits who began covering the saga on TikTok, wrote to us in an email. “If they were just honest about this from the beginning, I don’t think Brooke would [have] even made a TikTok.”
