I have a 2019 EX Premium Launch Edition with Battery Heater and Heat Pump. It is my daily driver, and I intend to use it for an occasional road trip. I will probably travel more often in a few years, after I retire. Most of the people and places I like best are well north of here, in New England and Canada, so I tend to configure a car for rough utility - WeatherTech floor and cargo liners (done), Winter wheels and tires (pending), etc. I swapped in LED fog lights per the instructions I found elsewhere on this forum. (Thank you whomever for posting that; it is an easy and effective mod.) I absolutely love this car, but I have a couple of questions/suggestions I wish I could run past the Kia engineers who designed/built it: 1) Why no 12v socket in the cargo bay? If I'm trying to repair a flat tire, I want to plug the inflater in right there, right? 2) Why no switch on the light in the cargo bay? If I'm car camping with the hatch open, I want to be able to turn that light off to save the battery, right? 3) 60kg/130lb load limit in the cargo bay?! What if I want to sleep in there? It should be at least twice that, in my opinion. (I intend to find a way to address this, and will publish it here after I figure it out...) 4 DC Fast Charging Speed is awkward. Because it reports above 75 kw at handshake, we pay for higher charge rates than we are actually getting on average at Electrify America 100+ kw charging stations. Rate of charge throttling is very aggressive when initiated with 50% or higher state of charge, or when pack is cold. 100 kw or better up to 80% SoC would be so much more practical. As it is, we're looking at roughly 2:1 travel:charging time, 3:1 at best, on the road, traveling at highway speeds. Is any of this addressable in software, and is there a fix forthcoming? Just my 2 shillings...
4 months and 6000 miles here. I have not found 1 or 2 to be an issue yet but I can see how both would be nice updates on future editions. On point 3, we haul far over that in the cargo area quite frequently and haven't seen any issues at all. I would guess that we have had over 500 pounds in on a couple occasions when moving our daughter and nothing seems worse for the wear. On point 4, maybe I have been very lucky but I am seeing more of a 4 to 1 ratio (sometimes more like 5 to 1) for driving to charging on the highway. I have several 240+ mile straight driving (95% or better on the highway) and 1 stop once for a 50 minute charging session. I definitely need a good stretch break at that point so I have no complaints about the time. I don't know that I have ever plugged into a DCFC at 50% or better though so maybe that's the different maker.
Thank you! The big @$$ wheelchair carrier on top is probably affecting my highway efficiency big time; I usually see no better than 3m/kw...
Whoa. You definitely have far less efficiency. I usually average 4.5 m/kWh on the highway (70+ mph) with cargo. The drag on your carrier must really take a toll.
Eco all the time. I only have dropped it in sport or normal mode for demo when I have taken people for a ride. We also have a 17 Leaf driving in Eco kind of comes naturally to us at this point.
