GoKawiilI first realized there was an issue with Kia’s flagship EV9 when I tried to unlock my car last year. The hulking three-row SUV was sitting on my driveway completely dead. The key didn’t work, the app connection to the car was gone, and I was already late to an appointment. Luckily, I had prepared for such a scenario, after reading about widespread 12-volt battery issues with the EV9.
I managed to open the car with the manual key that Kia supplies and access the frunk to reach the 12V battery and use a booster I had purchased to jolt it back to life. Like many ICE cars, a 12V battery powers most of the low-voltage electrical systems in a vehicle, so when it dies, the vehicle is rendered useless. I called my local Kia dealership to report the problem. I was prepared for the 12V battery issues, but I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
A few weeks after Kia had run software updates to address the 12V battery issue, I started to notice weird charging issues with my EV9. Every time I tried to charge past 80 percent, the car would jump from 82 percent to 100 percent on my home AC charger, as if it had miraculously instantly charged that last 18 percent. I also noticed the range of the car had gone down significantly at 100 percent charge, making it difficult to complete some longer journeys without having to charge again.
It seemed like a battery problem, the type of issue I’ve read so many people posting about on EV9 owner groups on Facebook. I reported the problem to Kia and they weren’t able to initially replicate it until I was able to record the issue on my phone while charging on a fast DC charger. The car would drop to a 0kW charge rate at 82 percent and take about 10 minutes to fake its way to 100 percent without the estimated range of the car ever changing.
After watching a variety of YouTube videos, I purchased an On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) scanner to plug into the car to retrieve more information about the battery. OBD II scanners let you see the amount of remaining energy in a battery pack at its current state of charge, as well as read the voltage levels across individual cells of an EV battery.
The EV9 has a modular battery pack that has been highly praised by engineering consulting firm Munro & Associates. It has 38 individual modules that can be replaced, making it easier for technicians to complete repairs. With the OBD II scanner, I could see that at 100 percent charge I only had 71kWh, whereas I should have had around 96kWh usable of the 99.8kWh battery. That meant I was missing 25 percent of the battery and in turn 25 percent of range. I could also see that some battery cells were dead and not holding a charge, but the car was still working and there were no errors or problems charging up to 82 percent.
After a couple of diagnostic sessions, my local Kia dealer eventually came to the conclusion that the main high-voltage battery pack was faulty and would need to be replaced. Instead of leaving it at the garage for a week or two, I entered into Kia’s battery repair program, which has no ETA and is part of the eight-year warranty cover that Kia provides for EV batteries in the UK.
The wait for a new battery can be as long as nine months
I soon learned after talking to more than a dozen EV9 owners in the UK that the wait could be as long as nine months for a battery fix, the amount of time it takes to create another future passenger for the back seats. Unlike some EV9 owners I’ve been speaking to, I’ve been able to continue using my car until Kia was ready to fix it. Some EV9 owners have had similar issues to mine, where the car stops charging at a certain percentage and the range nosedives. Others have had the battery pack totally fail or seen the range plummet to only 30 miles, making their cars unusable.
Kasem Saowijit described his EV9 battery failure issues as a “nightmare” in messages to The Verge. His EV9 failed in January and his local garage has provided a smaller EV6 as a courtesy car while he waits an undetermined amount of time for his car’s return. “Kia are absolutely pathetic, no update with a chase, and when I do get an update it’s a pointless update,” says Saowijit. His EV9 is only a year old, and he says he’s now wasting hundreds of pounds a month on a car lease he can’t use.
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