Kia Recall 7-speed DCT in South Korea

Unlike traditional automatic transmissions, Kia’s Dual Clutch Transmission (DCT) is derived from a manual transmission and gives you the convenience of smooth automatic gear changes whilst retaining the fuel economy benefits associated with a manual transmission. But today we have got bad news as Kia us recalling several models after finding issues.



First of all, I would like to explain how a DCT transmission operates.

The seven-speed automatic gearbox (DCT) takes the best of manual and automatic transmissions and combines them to deliver faster gear changes. The goal of the engineers as they designed the transmission was to deliver a 7% increase in fuel efficiency and a 5% improvement in acceleration over the existing 6-speed automatic transmission.

A pair of dry clutches are used in the DCT, each of which has an electric motor-driven clutch actuator to help improve fuel efficiency. There are also two gear input shafts used in the odd and even gear ratios. This set-up means that the DCT is able to immediately jump to any of its seven gears, or be able to do it sequentially, depending on what the driver needs at any given time.


The automaker’s new DCT unit is able to minimize the amount of torque lost during shifting by employing continuous power delivery, which also helps make each gear change incredibly smooth.

Now let’s talk about the issues, as our sources told us about this Kia press release is the brand is recalling several models using this transmission like the Sportage (QL), Stonic (YBCUV), Optima (JF), new K3 (BD) and new Soul (SK3).

The problem? Some DCT models are suffering an issue that only drives with 2nd, 4th, 6th gear. 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th gears are not working.