Hello everyone!
I have the following question: I purchased this car, 2018 KIA Forte LX brand new back when. My wife drives it and the issue we are having is that we cannot connect a USB memory device. It appears none of them fit. The funny thing is that she had one connected (plugged in) with music in it and worked fine, but we lost that memory. It was nothing special, just an old USB 2 or 4 GB device with music. Anyone knows why I cannot connect any other devices when I know one was plugged in just a few days ago? Do USB devices come in different sizes? Because they all look the same size to me.

Sure there is not a broken tab in the port?? Had that happen once.

Does the thumb drive not physically fit into the USB port? There are several USB port specifications, each with their own physical profile. Or the port could be damaged. A close inspection should reveal a mismatch here.

Or, perhaps the drive fits, but isn't recognized? In this case, there are several possibilities. Thumb drives are now much more capacious than they used to be, and the car software may not be able to handle a "bigger" drive. Or, it could be in a format that is incompatible with what the car wants. The lowest common denominator in this area is a drive with a MBR partition map (or no partition map), and a single file system formatted as FAT. Various file systems also have capacity limits that may be incompatible with the software baked into the car. Reformatting/erasing the drive into a format the car likes (or buying a new one of an appropriate size) should fix this. It is also possible that your dealership might be able to update the car software.

Finally, when talking about music files, the files themselves must be in a format that the car understands. This includes both the encoding scheme used, and the naming convention. MP3 audio files with names that match *.mp3 are probably the most widely supported.

Jeff - we have three Kia's in our family (2016, 2017, 2019) of various models, but none are a Forte.

Just for kicks I just took a 256GB combo USB-A/USB-C drive around to each to plug it into the USB-A slot. I did not have any problem inserting it into any of the three vehicles. Physically it fits fine. I did not check to see if the vehicles would recognize the USB device.

If it is a problem of the drive physically fitting, I would say your port is damaged somehow. Maybe a crumb or something else got jammed inside.

If it is a problem of your vehicle not recognizing device, I agree with architect that it is probably a formatting issue.

If it is formatting, I would recommend getting a 32GB USB drive and using a computer to format it to FAT32. I think FAT32 is pretty old and the car should be able to recognize it. Note that as the name implies it will only format up to 32GB max. So getting a drive larger than 32GB provides not value.

I'm with Black. If you had one in it and "lost it" and now one won't plug in, I'd guess the old one broke off and is plugging the connection port.