10 Things I hate about you… Kia EV9 gripe #8
After 9 months and 10,000 miles, I am extremely happy with my 2024 Kia EV9 GT-Line. Nothing is perfect, though, so I’ll walk you through my top 10 gripes with the EV9:
#8 The App
Kia’s EV6 and EV9 represent the technological peaks of their current vehicle lineup. As could be expected with constantly-connected vehicles, Kia has paired then with their Kia Access phone app.
The app reports charge status, travel history, location, vehicle status, and surroundings (in the form of a 360 degree picture).
The app also allows a degree of interactivity with the vehicle’s systems, controlling:
vehicle charging
charge door position
battery preconditioning
climate control
door locks, frunk opening, and hatch opening
charging schedule
HVAC schedules
HVAC settings
V2L settings
charge limits
some parental settings (speed and geofencing alerts)
rudimentary service appointment management
Sounds sweet, right?
Well, yes, and no. You see, Kia Access has been revised significantly since the vehicle shipped. The iteration that I used when I took delivery of my vehicle at the beginning of the year was like using something produced at a Hackathon. Functional, to some degree, but not production-ready.
HVAC control, in particular, was super disappointing. To explain, one of the nice things about having an EV, is that your AC/heat pump compressor is electrically driven. That means that it can be turned on, independently of the vehicle being driven. It also means that it can be turned on anywhere, including in home garages, without any negative effects. Since 2016, I’ve been in the habit of turning on my air (or heat) 5 minutes before I travel, in order to make sure my car is comfortable. The Kia, despite technically having the same ability, was pretty awful to use in practice.
You see, for having the same capabilities as a Tesla, Kia’s app made/makes the same functionality way harder to use. If I were to level-set, and say that Tesla’s app (which has its own issues) was the reference at 100%, I would have said that Kia’s was 20% back in February. Now? I’d say it’s about 70%.
That may sound like a massive improvement, and it is I guess - but it’s still well short of the market leader. And, really, my question would be: “why?”. I mean, it isn’t like Kia couldn’t have started with everything that’s good about Tesla’s app, and iteratively improved on it wherever they felt they could. I feel like you don’t really have a lot of freedom to innovate until you can provide a competitive product first. In this case, I’d say that the app is part of the product, and I think it’s clear that’s not Kia thought about it at all.
You get the impression that Kia benchmarked many vehicles when deciding how to build the EV9. Why not do the same with the app? The examples above show Kia Access in its vastly improved form, which makes it hard to imagine how awful it was before.
Eww.
