The car is somewhat reliable on the battery side (still have SOH over 101% after 90k km / 50k miles), but the gearbox and motor bearings issue can be tricky to fix.
Also the MY2019 vehicles do lack remote climate controls and battery preconditioning (which I'm still trying to fix with the app).
Wow, instantly stopped reading after this. I can't comprehend how someone would even remotely have the courage writing such in a public posting.
I didn't know they were billing for DC charging in the US based on Time instead of kwh. Thats odd. In Europe its just kwh.
I appreciate the autopilot effort of comma, but if this isn't hacking in the most classic sense of the word I don't know what is.
This is the kind of hacking / upgrades I’d love to see. All in cost was about $6k when I last checked probably a little more now. You get a pack teardown, and new CATL cells. Range goes to 400km~.
Weird bit of self-righteous misanthropy.
Most states have updated their laws to account for EV charging providers, and in those states we pay per kWh.
In the EU, yes. When you go to those dark corners of Europe that never achieved the membership, all bets are off.
In Montenegro and Serbia they charge per minute because the only entity allowed to sell kwh's is the national electricity company (in Serbia it's owned by Russia, so it is heavily legally protected).
Other systems I've seen (Chargepoint) also seem to be energy-based.
The Supercharger network is well done. It's a shame that they took this long to open up to other car models because they really do get a lot of things right.
As for the range, I'm getting about 110 miles of range. It depends how you drive. This is the 94Ah battery, the later models had more range.
Later models, 120ah full electric version, the range is about 250km. In comparison to newer cars, not a lot, but considering you can buy newish used ones for under 15k, its not a bad deal if it fits your needs.
I don't think you want that as no car will be able to charge at 250kW for very long for example.
And I believe we're starting to see even higher peak charging rates. As always, there's no simple answers
Some have reasonable limits to prevent abuse [0], others just charge the customer as much as they can get away with.
It also came in handy for a bad road trip (charging stations more than my range apart, so I couldn’t otherwise get there from here, but hold state of charge kept it up at 75% with frequent gas stops)
I understand the reasoning but sympathize with the luddites who shun all this technology. Imagine going on a road trip with your EV, stopping for a bite to eat and refresh while putting your car on the charger. Maybe there was a long line or you needed a long bathroom stop, so your car sits at the charger "too long" and you get a nice penalty.
Fine to leave for a few hours if your car needs a few hours to charge fully.
Not fine to leave for a few hours if your car was 15 minutes from full.
Anyway, this would be a new phase of car ownership ... or more like two phases and a ground, heh. The whole experience didn't take long to build into quite the saga, so what follows is a linkfest-style timeline of contents for different subsections.
Some of the sections are NOT completed yet, flagged by [Not yet]. Check back in a while -- this is an ongoing project, revisited in between times of actually making progress with the vehicle. That does seem like a lame excuse, but there were certain sections that needed to go live sooner than others.
So, how did all this start? Read about the leadup and decision process.
I expected that the majority of charging would be done at home, so I needed to research and build my own home fueling infrastructure. I already had many appropriate parts on hand and more on the way.
Once the actual unit I would buy was located, the purchase process was relatively painless, and a few days and a bit of logistics later, I was able to pick up the car. It began undergoing some early hacks only a few minutes later. Once it arrived at home, I was able to make more changes and check out all of my possible charging scenarios, some of which are rather scary.
Of course the big traction battery isn't the only one in the car, and it's worth gaining an understanding about the 12V auxiliary battery and how the car [and the owner!] takes care of it.
Three days into ownership, I drove into town and picked up my first tire problem. I didn't need to use the donut spare at the time, but it was still annoying. At least it was a relatively easy fix, and prompted a little more investigation into wheels, tires, and brakes.
In the interest of behavioral research and re-calibrating the battery management system, I was able to run the car *completely* out of energy in the main battery and then do a full recharge from its conceptual "dead". Here's how that played out, including some minor "rescue charging" games.
While waiting for that big charge-up I was able to start some basic "rip-and-tear" on parts of the car, to look at how it's put together and prepare for more necessary modifications. The highest priority was installing the Yuppie Button, a road-safety feature I cannot live without any more [and firmly believe that everybody needs one]. Later in the process, I was finally able to take the car dark to the data network and be confidently free of Hyundai's stupid BlueLink system and its intrusive telematics.
Later there was a closer look at the underside of the car in general, and keeping most of that exposed and viewable was a useful state to have it in during events of National Drive Electric Week. [I had unintentionally acquired the car just at the right time before then, and wound up exhibiting in *two* gatherings/shows that month with lots of stuff still torn apart and documented as a geeky technical display.] This page received a later update as I revisited the underside to check for various problems that became known over the following winter: leaking coolant pumps, and the condition of the drivetrain.
It was surprisingly easy to remove the instrument cluster for some minor changes. Several more noises that the car emits were mitigated in the process.
One could easily ask if I was actually *driving* this thing rather than just taking it apart For Science! The answer is an emphatic yes, I was having plenty of fun driving and discovering, and here's the "lab report" on many of the subtleties found and forum questions answered in the process. Much of it has to do with how regeneration and integrated braking works, which is one of the least understood topics of electric propulsion. But even non-technical people often comment on how driving an electric is just so surprisingly *easy*. My own driving style, refined in the Prius, could smoothly migrate over to driving the Kona in a conceptual sweet-spot region, even though the Prius was far more "engaging" in terms of that being tighter and more difficult to stay in.
Of course that is somewhat dependent on how the manufacturer designs the user experience for driveability and ergonomics. After about the third time hitting the "Park" button by mistake and being annoyed at the lack of tactile cues around the shifter control, I decided to do something about it and make the chance for error significantly lower.
At some point later I got around to playing with DC fast charging, and brought the oscilloscope along to geek out pretty hard on various observations around that. That market still has a long way to go as far as sorting out its business model, as billing based on *time* vs *energy* is completely unfair, and trying to force everyone to download janky apps just to play is disingenuous and short-sighted. An excuse that's offered less and less often is that pricing by kilowatt-hours delivered is prohibited in some states by utility regulatory rules. That's been constructively changing. Unfortunately if we want to recharge quickly and get back to a roadtrip, we have to deal with the present naivete' in several different fledgling fast-charger networks as they sort out their growing pains and politics.
One morning I took a sudden notion to pull the driver-side door apart for a look inside, particularly to learn how much I should worry about water landing on the armrest and window switches.
About six months into ownership I finally found a real spare tire solution, which was a bit of an adventure but not only seems to have worked out well, is something that any other Kona EV owner can order and dispense with the stupid OEM "goop kit". This gave me more confidence about doing longer roadtrips, but I hadn't thought too much about that when the pandemic hit and roadtrips were out of the question for a while anyway. With both cars just sitting unused for a long time and risk becoming chipmunk hotels, a project to explore under the wiper cowl and critter-proof various openings was appropriate. As the summer approached for real and trips became a little more likely, I did come up with a satisfactory sleeper solution to be ready whenever I could hit the road again.
Later in the summer I decided to experiment with LED headlight options, but kept the OEM halogen bulbs handy in case that didn't work out.
In response to the whole flap about battery fires, primarily in Korea ... recall notices started rolling in, but none of the local dealers were prepared to deal with it in the correct fashion. I sent this letter to one that had been notably vocal about it. If they were so worried that everyone's running around in a rolling bomb, they need to stop dicking around and fix the problem for real, meaning replacement packs for everyone.
Chapter Two
In the spring of 2021, my 2019 Kona got rear-ended in a chain collision, due to some dipshit blonde not paying attention. Despite the middle car absorbing a lot of the causative impact energy, my car was ultimately totaled. So I got another one, a 2021, almost an exact clone of the first Kona but with a battery pack less likely to explode, and the story continues merrily on from there!
In addition, I acquired a "backup" secondary electric vehicle around the same timeframe, not quite what I expected but that's how it and the surrounding saga worked out.
The new Kona was not immune to early-life tire problems either, again caused by some random injurious object on a not-quite-post-pandemic trip to Florida. I was very glad to have the spare tire and associated kit mentioned earlier. A little later after that trip I dug into the rear brakes a bit to try and diagnose scraping noises I kept hearing from back there, to begin a general discussion of periodic brake clean-out at both ends, similar to what I tried to get around to on the Prius about once a year.
On the topic of charging-network growing pains again, by late 2022 there was a clearly developing trend of broken charging sites, so there's some update material at the end of that writeup. In particular, it looked like Blink would never get their shit together. Well-named, indeed. And then later in 2023, with Tesla starting to get more into the public charging network and pushing their "NACS" connector to become more "standard" than CCS, the "app problem" really rears it ugly head along with that. Here is an open letter to all charging networks, with more detail on why apps are not the right answer for public charger access. To finish out 2023, on my usual holiday run southward, the experiences particularly with Electrify America in Florida were less than stellar, which I ranted about to some colleagues back home.
More sections of this may be still in the works, such as
... and continuing to document whatever else falls out of the experience in a useful way.