Carnivals are supposed to be fun. But the owner of a Carnival, specifically a Kia Carnival, isn’t enjoying it at all—thanks to a gas tank door that wouldn’t open.
Cee Stanley (@cee.stanley), the car’s owner, said that her minivan recently left her in a lurch. While driving with her six kids, the mom said that couldn’t get her car’s gas tank to open. She was particularly antsy, she said, because she had just one mile of gas left in her tank.
Stanley chronicled the episode in a video that had more than 3.5 million views as of Wednesday afternoon. “Let me show you how sh*tty Kia is,” Stanley said as she fiddled with the car to try to get the gas tank to open.
@cee.stanley Kia, I’d like a refund 🫠
♬ original sound – Cee.Stanley
She then called her local dealership for advice, but said that they were no help. “They don’t know how to tell me to open it,” she said. “I could bring it in for them to fix it, but it’s gonna take them two days and they don’t have a loaner vehicle to give me.”
The “next scheduled opening appointment that I could book,” she added, “is [in] December.”
In the accompanying video caption, Stanley doubled down on her frustration with Kia, and asked for a refund. “If I could, I would stick this car up Kia’s,” she said, with the final word implied.
In a follow-up video, Stanley said that she finally got the door open, but was mystified by the process. Essentially, she said that she got it to work by opening and closing a sliding door “a hundred times.”
@cee.stanley Replying to @🔆franciinejohannah💜🐻 ♬ original sound – Cee.Stanley
“I’m paying too much money for this car for it to be giving me these little problems,” Stanley concluded.
On the second video, some commenters wrote that there are various manual releases in the car that should help open the gas tank. Others, however, disputed those claims.
“I find when it happens it’s really a random series of events that causes it to open again,” one person said. “Somewhere in turning the car on / off / accessory and locking and unlocking and locking the doors (trying the fuel door each time) it ends up working.”
Meanwhile, under Stanley’s first video, a Kia tech claimed to know the answer to her problem. “There should be a panel in the trunk with a pull tab on it to manually open it,” they wrote.
But not everyone was as helpful. One commenter, for instance, took the opportunity to lecture Stanley. “That’s also why you never let your gas tank get that empty… especially if you have 6 kids to drive around,” they wrote. To this comment, Stanley responded: “Not everyone has a gas station close by.”
To be sure, this is not the first time that a Kia Carnival owner has experienced a similar issue. This predicament was also a topic of discussion on the carnivalforums site.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Stanley via TikTok comment and to Kia by email.
