Kia found OBC unit & battery cells to be faulty!

[JejuSoul]

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Seems like you have a brand new 27kWh battery. Great. Glad it is fixed at last.

Have you checked the charge timer and the climate timer. Perhaps one of those is on and has distorted the final SOC reading slightly

 

[curtalva]

All seems good. Charging to 100% and it appears to have 30 kWh capacity from what I'm seeing on my charging reports and my calculations. Back and forth to work (74 miles round trip) and over 30 miles to spare.

p.s. At least until the heat of the Phoenix summer comes again.

 

[nickb64]

I have been working with KIA Consumer Affairs representative through the entire process (since beginning of October). And I have, in fact, been working with an "Escalated Case Manager" since about October 10th (or so). I wonder how it is that you were able to get your car repaired quicker? What dealership were you working with? Kia Of Irvine?

We were going through Kia of Cerritos. We had occasional calls from a couple different people at Kia over the period they had our car, though they usually were just asking us if we had heard anything from the dealership, up until the day before we were told our car was ready to pick up the Case Manager had no idea that Kia of Cerritos had even received the battery replacement part and was letting me know they would look into when the part would arrive.

I have noticed that the public chargepoint stations we use the most now report that the car never draws more than approximately 5.8kW where it used to report about 6.1kW usage for most of a charging session.

 

[edman98]

2 years & 6 months, 32K miles.

Since Nov 2016, my effective range has been 55 mi on a full charge (while Kia reports 4.5 mi/kWh).

I'm at about 50mi on a full charge after ~3 years, 40k miles. I need to read this entire thread, thanks!

 

[nickb64]

I'm at about 50mi on a full charge after ~3 years, 40k miles. I need to read this entire thread, thanks!

I would recommend having as much documentation as you can to show the problem you are having. Our first couple visits to the service department to try to get some diagnosis of the issue were pretty much a complete waste of time. They said that they couldn't find a problem, though I never got an answer about whether they even attempted to determine the capacity of the battery at that point.

We began documenting trip length through pictures of the ECO driving screen and the battery status at the beginning and end of each trip, as our car was still reporting range estimates in the upper 80s to mid 90s but providing real world use of about 40-45 miles.

We also took screenshots of the Chargepoint app to show how much power we received per public charging session along with pics of the battery percentage at the beginning and end of the session. Using this I was able to determine a rough estimate that we had about 60-65 percent of the battery capacity available.

I forwarded all of this documentation to the service advisor we were working with at the dealership and we got a fairly quick resolution after that. The slowest part was actually getting the parts to the dealership to do the battery replacement. The battery itself took almost 6 weeks to arrive and we had our car back by the end of business the next day.

 

[edman98]

Thank you! Great advice. In our case, we have a Blink charger at home and the Kia gauge shows Fully Charged with ~50mi.

 

[nickb64]

Thank you! Great advice. In our case, we have a Blink charger at home and the Kia gauge shows Fully Charged with ~50mi.

Ok, if your Blink charger has any way of telling you how much power your vehicle draws in a charging session I woul take screenshots and take note of what battery level you were at when plugging in and what you are at when unplugging. If you can determine how many kWh your car received in a session and what percentage the car says you charged up to you can get a rough idea of how much capacity your existing battery has available based on the original capacity of ~27kWh iirc. I know with Chargepoint the app shows the power used for each session, I'm not sure if Blink would do something like that either on their app or the website.

 

[edman98]

Thanks for the advice. Don't think the blink charger is that sophisticated, but will check. I just see the next morning the KIA EV shows full charge with a range of about 50mi

Have an appt with Kia for SOH. They didn't want to but we insisted. And they've been telling us that 1) it's normal or 2) they haven't seen these issues before. Contradictory.

 

[nickb64]

Thanks for the advice. Don't think the blink charger is that sophisticated, but will check. I just see the next morning the KIA EV shows full charge with a range of about 50mi

Have an appt with Kia for SOH. They didn't want to but we insisted. And they've been telling us that 1) it's normal or 2) they haven't seen these issues before. Contradictory.

Yeah our first couple times getting it checked out they said it was normal just depending on the type of driving i.e. highway vs city. But we were doing exactly the same mix as always and getting half the range so we kept at it and did as much as we could to document the problem and they finally got it escalated to corporate and got approval to replace the battery