EV9 gripe #4 UPDATE!
NHTSA 24V757 - KIA Recall
Upon turning on my vehicle and engaging reverse, I’d be left with severely dimmed screens. In that state, they were unusable for seeing proximity warnings or camera feeds. It didn’t happen every time. It would resolve itself sometime shortly after putting the vehicle in drive. My EV9 was like this for months.
This week, I received a safety recall NHTSA 24V757. Sure enough, the interface bug I’d mentioned before was in violation of FMVSS 101, and needed to be fixed as a matter of legal compliance.
The fix is an OTA. That makes sense, since the bug was introduced in an OTA, too. Interestingly, the dealer service will load the OTA for you, if you don’t want to do it yourself. That seems like the old days of Let me Google that for you.
I’ve loaded the OTA, and the EV9 seems to be better - and, therefore, safer.
Good?
The narrative point still stands… Kia (and any other manufacturer with OTAs) needs to operate with a culture of quality. This shouldn’t be that hard for them, since most software fixes in the past had to be loaded via dealer service. Reimbursing dealers for the time they spent loading these fixes necessitated it going as cleanly as possible.
It’s tempting to fall into the “move fast and break things” mentality, but software in a 6000lb car that goes 90 miles per hour, isn’t the same as a social media platform. The consequences of failure are different, and so therefore, must be the quality expectation. Just because you can deploy a fix quickly doesn’t mean that you should count on that to rectify otherwise preventable problems.
