2016 Soul EV+ Battery Replacement - Remanufactured?

[jray3]

Russell, what makes you think that Electrify America over-amped your battery? I blame EA for slow-rolling CHAdeMO as part of their master plan to kill us off (before they got killed by NACS). I regularly saw 74 kW on an EA DCFC before they throttled the equipment back to 50 kW. Our original 27 kWH battery was rated for 90 kW output, and should be just as capable of 90 kW input.

 

[FLKiaEV]

Because I was there when it happened. The display on the EA charger shows how much energy it's putting in at any given time and I saw it go to 50kw quickly and then up to about 60kw for several seconds before ramping down and stopping. The Kia Soul EV can accept only 50kw of DC power, similar to the Chevy Bolt EV (55kw). The motor is rated at 87kw, but that's a totally different thing. If you are charging your Soul EV at 74kw you are definitely playing with fire. This should not even be possible since your vehicle should be communicating with the charger and telling it how many watts it can handle.

"Our original 27 kWH battery was rated for 90 kW output, and should be just as capable of 90 kW input."

Sadly, this is not how it works. The acceptable input power to charge the battery and how much power it can output to the motor(s) are not related.

 

[JeroenE]

The Kia Soul EV can accept only 50kw of DC power, similar to the Chevy Bolt EV (55kw).

No they can do about 63 kW DC charging, and I've seen mine do 81 kW with regenerative braking.

The 'old' Chademo chargers in my country would only do about 43 kW but nowadays there are some newer ones which will do about 63 kW. Only when the battery is pretty empty of course and not for really long. But those chargers are noticeably faster than the older ones.

Of course, they will be dying out in Europe as all new cars have CCS and hardly any new chargers provide Chademo.

You can find and old post showing the 63 kW Charging here: https://www.mykiasoulev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5269#p5269

 

[FLKiaEV]

I'm only talking about what the onboard DC fast charging is rated for. I wouldn't recommend pushing it beyond that limit. I'm sure my washing machine could handle quite a bit more than 110V, but I'm not about to test that.

 

[ksoul2084]

I've seen mine do about 63 kW DC charging also using a newer fast charger.

AFAIK Chademo is a spec and if the charger and the car decide it can take 63 kW, then 63 KW it is.

Maybe with the newer battery packs (and now BMS and wiring harnesses) my car is "upgraded".

 

[FLKiaEV]

To be honest, 50kw is perfectly fine for me, as I rarely need it. Like most EV owners I do 99% of my charging at home and on the rare occasion that I do need fast charging, it's only for a small number of miles so I charge to 80% or less. Just enough to get me to my destination. I do look forward to the day when EVs can routinely charge from 10% to 80% in five minutes. They're pretty close to that now, so maybe in the next 5 years or so.

 

[JeroenE]

I'm only talking about what the onboard DC fast charging is rated for. I wouldn't recommend pushing it beyond that limit.

I can't push it beyond it's limit. That is just the Soul EV itself deciding it will charge at 63 kW. Note that for DC fast charging there is no onboard charger, the fast charger is always outside the car.

I'm not sure why you think 50 kW is the maximum rated charging speed. 50 kW is the rated speed for the older chademo chargers. However because they are limited in both V and A at a typical "old" 50 kW fast charger the Soul will only take 43kW. The V is limited by the cars battery and the A is limited by the fast charger.

Newer chargers will provide more A (and V I think). The V is still the same limit as the car battery hasn't changed. But because the fast charger can provide more A it will charge faster.

 

[FLKiaEV]

All of the manufacturer mentions of the charging limits mention 50kw for fast charging. For example: https://www.kiamedia.com/us/en/models/soul-ev/2016/specifications (it's the 8th item under "charging"). I have a 2018 Soul EV now, but previously I had a 2016 one. At an Electrify America DCFC I watched as it ramped up rapidly to over 60kw (to my dismay), charged for a few seconds and then ended the session as I was about to hit the "stop" button. I ended up going to a different charge network, but for the next few weeks my max charge range plummeted, ending up around 40 miles at 100%. Luckily I was still under warranty (thanks to Kia's industry leading 10 year warranty on the entire EV system, including the battery which was replaced). Don't know what actually happened to the EV system, but thank goodness for the warranty, though it took almost nine months to get the battery replaced because this happened during covid. The dealer provided a rental car luckily, which ended up costing them just over $11,000! The battery, according to the invoice, was just under $9000 for a total of about $20,000. I'm sure when they made that offer for the rental car they were thinking that the battery would take a few weeks at most to get and replace.

 

[JeroenE]

All of the manufacturer mentions of the charging limits mention 50kw for fast charging. For example: https://www.kiamedia.com/us/en/models/soul-ev/2016/specifications (it's the 8th item under "charging").

That's not the charging power limit, that's an entry that says how much time charging will take. It says it takes 33 minutes to charge at 50 kW to 80%.

I don't read it that it means that you can't charge faster. As long as the charger can provide more power it's possible to charge faster, my car has done this quite some times.

I don't want to invalidate your experience, and that charger could have very well done something that was not right. It shouldn't, but like all things it can do things it's not supposed to do.

My battery was also replaced under warranty (in 2019) and I never had any experience like you. Once it went "bad" it got worse very quickly and I needed to fast charge more and more during my commute (while before I didn't need any). I don't know how much the replacement car cost them to be honest, I didn't see any bill because it was all warranty.

 

[mariano3113]

"Our original 27 kWH battery was rated for 90 kW output, and should be just as capable of 90 kW input."

Sadly, this is not how it works. The acceptable input power to charge the battery and how much power it can output to the motor(s) are not related.

27kWh (93-mile Soul EVs) were/are capable 100kW CHAdeMO charging speed max.
https://longtailpipe.com/2015/04/06/kia-soul-ev-with-93-mile-range-100-kw-chademo-second-only-to-model-s-in-driving-autonomy/

https://longtailpipe.com/2015/07/29/kia-soul-ev-can-do-100-kw-chademo-prep-for-200-mile-range-evs/
"I sent an email to Kia’s media team.

Their answer was: “The Soul EV is compatible with 100 kW CHAdeMO, and the car is capable of charging on a 100 kW CHAdeMO charger. The cars were not specifically configured for tests.”

That’s cool – if only there were 100 kW CHAdeMO charging stations in public. Unfortunately there aren’t. For the reasons I mention above, we should expect the charging networks to install 100+ kW CHAdeMO over the coming years. We all should start bugging the charging networks to see when/if they’ll start doing so. eVgo recently announced they’ll roll 100+ kW CHAdeMO into their network sometime in the future."

Most CHAdeMO stations are 50-65kW but the Soul EV was capable of 100kW minus charging losses.

https://www.photovoltaik.eu/mobilitaet-ladetechnik/kia-startet-100-kilowatt-ladestation

 

[FLKiaEV]

This makes no sense! Since most reviews of the 2015-2018 Soul EV criticized it for its bottom-of-the-list 50kw DC fast charging capability (as published by Kia themselves), why would they not say up front that it can do 100kw? They definitely dropped the ball on that one. Even if they made this discovery late, they should have notified the press and current owners. I looked it up and apparently the CHAdeMO standard supports up to 400kw, but those stations are rare.

 

[JeroenE]

As far as I know at that time the 50 kW Chademo chargers were standard, there weren't any faster. At least not in Europe. They had one in their own facility in Germany, but that was not open for the public. Apparently because it was not certified for use on the normal public electrical grid. It makes no use to advertise you can charge faster while at the same time nobody can because there aren't any chargers around.

After a few years there was a faster charger in Switzerland. It was a bit unclear if that was the case because they my have had other electrical standards than the EU. At that time the biggest charging company here said they had still no interest in updating their chargers. Nowadays faster Chademo chargers are more common (at least in The Netherlands), but those are all at newer charging sites.

However since Europe choose the CCS standard they're hardly any new Chademo stations being built.

 

[FLKiaEV]

My biggest concern is that CHAdeMO will go away because CCS and NACS (Tesla) are the two dominant standards now. And now that GM, Ford and Stellantis and some others have announced that they are also switching to NACS, that will make it even harder. I can't believe that someone hasn't invented a Tesal-to-CHAdeMO or CCS-to-CHAdeMO converter, even if it was not full speed. After all, there are over a million CHAdeMO EVs in the world. Luckily I rarely need to use the CHAdeMO connector, but on those rare occasions it would be nice to have that ability.

 

[JeroenE]

Theoretically that can be done. There's a Chademo to Tesla converter available (or at least was) that most fast charging stations had hanging near at least one charging station back in the day.

But that's a rather bulky thing and the Tesla connector is pretty slim. Having two big connectors on either side would make it even more bulky.

I guess the market for these things would be very small. Way back Tesla had a pretty big market share so it made sense to provide one at your charging station to try to get them to charge. But Chademo cars are dying out, so why would you want to get expensive converters for them at all your stations?

The Kia Soul EV used to be our primary car, but now it's used as the second car. We hardly ever used to fast charge. I can charge at home and at work so I always left fully charged. Only on some trips we needed to fast charge and usually only for a few minutes to get enough energy to reach the destination.

 

[FLKiaEV]

I've heard from some engineers that doing a CHAdeMO to Tesla conversion is fairly straightforward, but going the other direction is more complicated. And I agree that the incentive to build such a thing is low, but I also know that many engineers love a challenge and we have things like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo to fund such things. So who knows? What would really be cool is if Kia, Hyundai, Nissan and other other CHAdeMO offered a conversion to CCS for a fee, which many of us would be willing to pay if it's not too outrageous. Personally I think $1000 or less would be doable, but others may balk at that price. Anyway, I'm not holding my breath but I'm hoping for the best.

 

[JeroenE]

There are convertors on Aliexpress already. But very little to no detail on how this is working. The price is a lot higher than you want.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006011665873.html

There are also a guy in Europe who built a CCS2 to Chademo convertor. They use lots of electronics in between. That is something I believe in more. But that is a prototype / test. You can't buy it (as far as I know).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfCaqdUFx3Q

 

[FLKiaEV]

Thanks for the info. I'll check it out! [edit: Over $2000 is bit more than what I wanted to pay, true, and the photos seem to be CG so that seems a little suspect too. I did find this Lectron Tesla-to-J1772 adapter for under $200 that could come in handy for some people. Here's the link: https://a.co/d/dbJk7k7

 

[raskal]

Hi all
This thread has been a great read, I appreciate everyone's thoughts!

My 2018 Soul EV is down to 69.2 % SOH, my dealer wants to wait until it's around 67% before requesting a replacement. We were planning to wait until the spring to have it tested again, but with the experiences here, I think we'll have it checked sooner as the wait times here are at longer than I expected.

As for charging; AFAIK, Kia took out the option to charge to 80% for the 2018 year, so I'm not sure how I can reasonably charge to only 80%. The only way I can see it working is to calculate when 80% would be reached and go outside to turn off the charger.

And fast charging, my belief was that the car requested the charge rate from the DC fast charger. The maximum I've ever seen was 66kW, and I have been to a bunch of 100kW chargers. Since our range has gone down (currently at 103km), we've had to use fast chargers a lot more often

 

[IanL]

I use the timed charging option on my 2018, knowing roughly how long it takes from 30% to 80%. That way you don't have to switch off by hand. At 16A, it takes about 5hr 20min, and at 32A about 2hr 50min. Just make sure the "override timer" button is not pressed!

 

[DaEV]

Hi all
This thread has been a great read, I appreciate everyone's thoughts!

My 2018 Soul EV is down to 69.2 % SOH, my dealer wants to wait until it's around 67% before requesting a replacement. We were planning to wait until the spring to have it tested again, but with the experiences here, I think we'll have it checked sooner as the wait times here are at longer than I expected.

As for charging; AFAIK, Kia took out the option to charge to 80% for the 2018 year, so I'm not sure how I can reasonably charge to only 80%. The only way I can see it working is to calculate when 80% would be reached and go outside to turn off the charger.

And fast charging, my belief was that the car requested the charge rate from the DC fast charger. The maximum I've ever seen was 66kW, and I have been to a bunch of 100kW chargers. Since our range has gone down (currently at 103km), we've had to use fast chargers a lot more often

Blimey. What mileage do you have on your 2018 Soul ? Is it the 27kwh or 30?
I also have a 30kwh 2018 Soul with 50k miles on the clock still showing 100% soh.
I've never been particularly fussy about charging. Always take it to 100% on the home charger, rarely goes below 50% .
Every 6 weeks I go on a 500+ mile round trip and use public charging network, recharging every 50-80 miles, again either as much as the car will allow ( 94% on DC) or as much as I need to get to the next chargepoint + 20 "just in case" miles.
Range is still 120 miles in warmer weather, 100 in colder.