A Maryland man who paid $229.45 to be told nothing was wrong with his SUV has turned that repair order into a proposed nationwide class action against Kia America. The class action complaint, filed June 3, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California as case 8:26-cv-01428, accuses Kia of selling seven model years of Telluride — 2020 through 2026, effectively the entire first generation — with an electrical architecture that won’t stop drinking from the 12-volt battery after you walk away from it.
Plaintiff Marc Brenman bought a certified pre-owned 2021 Telluride from Herson’s Kia in Rockville, Maryland in June 2021 with 4,824 miles on it. The filing says that beginning around fall 2025 his dashboard started telling him the “battery is discharging to an external device,” which is a fun message to receive when nothing is plugged in. He replaced the battery. It happened again — this time badly enough that the fob wouldn’t unlock the truck, and he cut his hand prying the door open manually to get at the hood. The battery was two months old. The odometer hadn’t reached 33,416 miles. On December 3, 2025 the dealer ran a diagnostic, pronounced the battery, alternator, starter, drive belts and terminals “in good condition,” charged him $184.49 in labor plus $44.96 in fees, and sent him home with the same problem he arrived with.
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Anyone who has worked a parasitic draw complaint knows exactly what that repair order represents. It’s not incompetence. It’s the single hardest failure to catch in a modern vehicle.
The complaint blames the wrong box, and that matters
The filing pins the defect on the Electronic Control Module, which it describes as the component regulating current flow between the battery and things like the alternator, power steering and radio. That’s not how Hyundai Motor Group vehicles are wired.
In Kia’s own nomenclature, the ECM is the engine control module — fuel, spark, emissions. It does command the alternator over a LIN line as part of the charging strategy, so the complaint isn’t entirely off in the weeds. But the module responsible for putting the body electronics to bed, watching for the key fob, arming the immobilizer and managing the sleep/wake handshake across the CAN bus is the IBU, the Integrated Body control Unit. If something in a Telluride is refusing to go to sleep, the IBU and the junction blocks around it are where a technician starts, not the engine computer.
Here’s the tell: the owners cited in Kia’s own regulatory record already figured this out. One NHTSA report reproduced in the filing (ID 11643138, February 2025, a 2023 Telluride) states plainly, “I suspect IBU Module or some other wiring tobe causing a parasitic draw.” That owner is more diagnostically precise than the pleading built around his complaint.
There is probably more than one failure here
Read the eight NHTSA reports the lawsuit reproduces and a pattern emerges that undercuts the “one defect” framing.
One 2021 owner (ID 11720148, February 2026) reported cooling fans running continuously after shutdown, with a dealer identifying a faulty fan relay. That’s not a sleep-mode software issue — a stuck fan relay pulls 20 to 40 amps and will flatten a healthy battery in a couple of hours. Different failure, same symptom.
Several others describe a “Check ESC” message before a no-start. Electronic stability control modules are among the most voltage-sensitive nodes on the bus; drop system voltage during cranking and ESC throws a fault as a consequence of low battery, not a cause. Same with windows that drop a quarter-inch and won’t auto-up: the window module loses its pinch-protection calibration when voltage collapses. Owners and service advisors alike routinely chase these downstream artifacts as if they were the disease.
A typical modern vehicle settles somewhere around 20 to 50 milliamps once every module has genuinely gone to sleep, and that can take 20 minutes to an hour after the doors are locked. Break the circuit with an inline ammeter and you wake the whole bus back up and restart the clock. This is why the correct procedure is a clamp meter around the negative cable, a long wait, then pulling fuses one at a time to isolate the circuit — and why a 45-minute diagnostic slot produces the words “in good condition.”
Why a new battery keeps dying
Lead-acid chemistry doesn’t forgive. Every deep discharge sulfates the plates, and that capacity loss is permanent. Flatten a battery three or four times and you have a battery that still passes a load test on a warm afternoon in the service drive and won’t crank at 20 degrees in a driveway. Worse, an alternator is a maintenance device, not a charger; repeatedly asking it to bulk-charge a dead battery cooks the rectifier and shortens its life too. So the “battery, alternator, starter all fine” verdict has a shelf life.
There’s a second wrinkle owners and independent shops miss. Modern charging systems use a sensor on the negative battery terminal to monitor state of charge and vary alternator output accordingly. Swap the battery without the system relearning, and the charging strategy can be calibrated to a battery that no longer exists — undercharging a new one into an early grave.
The legal and financial reality
The suit pleads violations of the Maryland Consumer Protection Act, fraud by omission, breach of express and implied warranty, and unjust enrichment, with a nationwide class and a Maryland subclass. Notably absent: any Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act claim. That’s deliberate, not sloppy — the federal warranty statute requires at least 100 named plaintiffs for a class claim in federal court, and this case has one.
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Owners should also understand what the requested relief can and cannot deliver. The complaint asks the court to order a corrective recall campaign. Courts can order money, restitution and injunctions. They cannot order a safety recall — that authority sits with NHTSA under the Motor Vehicle Safety Act, and the way consumers move that lever is by filing complaints and, ultimately, a defect petition. If you have a Telluride that won’t hold a charge, report it. Complaint density is what opens investigations.
Insurance won’t help you either. Comprehensive and collision don’t cover mechanical or electrical failure, extended service contracts almost universally classify batteries as wear items, and repeated roadside jump-start claims on a policy rider will get you flagged long before they get you fixed. The diminished-value theory driving this lawsuit exists precisely because there’s no insurance product that covers it.
Read the filing carefully and it gets sloppy
Two of the eight NHTSA identification numbers reproduced in the complaint are used twice, attached to different report dates and different narratives — ID 11564861 appears with both a January 2024 and a May 2024 date, and 11518264 appears twice, the second time attached to a narrative describing events in 2024 and 2025 that could not have been filed in April 2023. A footnote sourcing Kia’s 2019 Telluride launch materials actually links to a 2025 awards release. And the numerosity estimate — roughly 100,000 class members — is conservative to the point of being wrong. Kia’s own NHTSA recall report for the unrelated power-seat campaign covers 462,869 Tellurides from 2020 through 2024 alone.
That campaign, 26V430 (Kia code SC374), is a separate matter that replaces the earlier 2024 recall after Kia concluded the first remedy didn’t work. It carries a park-outside advisory for fire risk and a new electronic fuse assembly as the fix. If your Telluride is dying overnight, that recall will not address it.
The timing is awkward for Kia. The Telluride posted its best-ever annual sales in 2025 as part of the brand’s record 852,155 units, and the second-generation 2027 model is arriving now — which means every vehicle in this proposed class is about to become a used car competing against a shiny replacement.
What to actually do
Insist the repair order records the measured parasitic draw in milliamps, not a narrative. That number is your entire paper trail — for a warranty escalation, a state lemon law claim, or a future settlement that requires proof of the defect. Ask whether the shop let the modules sleep fully before measuring and whether they used a clamp meter. Ask whether the battery was registered or the charging system reset after replacement. And if you’re buying a used first-gen Telluride, bring a clamp meter, or bring someone who owns one.
None of these allegations have been tested. Kia hasn’t answered the complaint. But the diagnostic problem underneath the lawsuit is real, expensive, and being paid for by owners at $229.45 a visit.