Way to prove my points, Kia

You need to communicate breaking changes better, Kia

Although I’m only halfway through my “10 Things I Hate About You” series on my Kia EV9, Kia couldn’t wait for me to finish before responding.

Don’t take that to mean that they saw my posts and decided to address them.

Instead, they amalgamated some of my concerns about the infotainment and some of the problems with the OTA update process. FUN! Let’s dig in…

63 Percent of the smartphone market is made up of Androids, so it’s not a fringe thing for me to have an S22+. The EV9 supports Android Auto, which I like to use, but only occasionally. Basically, I appreciate it on long road trips, but otherwise I prefer the Kia infotainment and the normal functionality of my phone.

When I took delivery of my EV9, the state of the infotainment was such that Spotify would start to play as soon as I started my car… even if I’d been listening to something else as I was starting the vehicle. Annoying, for sure, but not the end of the world. I tried a few tweaks that were suggested online, but I was never able to get the behavior the way I wanted it. “Forcing” A2DP was pretty easy - only requiring that you start playback in whatever application again. At some point, an OTA broke AVRCP somewhat, but that wasn’t that important to me, anyway.

Then, one day, an OTA made it to where I could no longer stream music over Bluetooth to my EV9. My phone was linked for Bluetooth call handling, but for whatever reason, it no longer showed A2CP as an enabled capability in the Bluetooth pairing (verified on the phone side). Poking around in the EV9 Bluetooth menu showed something new, as of that OTA! Now you can enable/disable HFP (phone), A2DP (streaming audio), and Android Auto from toggle icons. The A2DP and Android Auto selections are mutually exclusive.

Um. Ok.

It can be argued that this is the most logical way to handle this functionality. I have no doubt that the previous implementation caused lots of confusion and complaint. Someone, somewhere probably thought it was a better idea to push this change out into the wild, rather than have more complaints flood in.

Are engineers and PMs really the best at making general market interface decisions?

I work in software, so I definitely understand the mentality. The problem is that you’re changing the behavior of an existing system - including with people that didn’t have workflows that were affected by the initial problem, but are affected by the solution. If anyone wants to say that there is a change log published with the OTAs, I have an issue with that argument. You apply OTA when you turn off your vehicle. The next time you turn on your vehicle, it’s presumably because you want to go somewhere. You can drive, or you can bring up the changelog. You can pull it up later, but it’s buried in a menu, so you have to be at least a little motivated to go get it. If you pull it up, it looks like developer notes on a code pull request in Git.

Tesla, does a much better job in this regard, usually. Sometimes, their OTA changelogs just say “Minor fixes”, which is an F-, in terms of both usefulness and effort. However, when they introduce any feature or change of any real consequence, the changelog is actually useful. There are screenshots of the changes and how it affects the user. There are verbose explanations of the changes and their consequences.

There is no reason why Kia couldn’t do the same. You have a 12.3” middle screen - use it. If you don’t think that people are reading the changelogs, email them one too. It’s not that hard. You can’t treat vehicles receiving significant OTA updates as though they’re just like the cars you’re used to selling, that basically remain static in their functionality from sales floor to scrap yard.

As far as the implementation of the A2DP vs. Android Auto goes, I think it’s kind of a B- solution - even if they had been a better job of documenting and communication the solution. I say that because users already have an expectation of the Bluetooth handshake happening every time they get in the car. It’s more intuitive to have an easy to access toggle from the Media or main screen.

You don’t have to agree with my suggestion, though, because maybe I don’t have the best ideas. So why not create a user community via the online accounts that you make your customer create anyway, to access a user feedback tool, like Canny? Democratizing your customer feedback is more effective than solely relying on PM/PO, and channel feedback.