Kia Access/uvo remote access question for e-niro

As near as I can tell, all remote start does is turn on the climate control. I have only started to notice it shuts off before I reach the vehicle sometimes. I rarely use it, which is good considering UVO wants $22.50 a month after the free first year. Wtf? WAY too expensive.

 

I absolutely hate how Hyundai and Kia do this with their vehicles. Everybody else has the remote start feature on their key fob. But Hyundai and Kia you have to pay an app service, a monthly fee to remote start your vehicle. I personally think it's a bunch of BS and you shouldn't have to pay for it. Their rationale is the app does so much more for you. My point is I don't want all the rest of the malarkey, I just want to be able to remote start my vehicle.

 

Am I right that there's no way to do heated seats with the "remote start" using UVO? Just heating, defrost, and heated steering wheel?

 

I may have used the remote features maybe 5 times in the last year, the car gets to temp rather quickly that I don't really need the remote features.

 

As far as I can see, this is the case. I would like to have my heated seats turn on remotely. Seems like a miss from Kia.

 

I’d imagine that very few people will pay that much per month. Maybe that will send a message and they’ll lower or eliminate the fee.

 

I would agree. IIRC, they want $22.50 a month in order to remotely control the climate since you have to buy the highest tier. My lease payment is $178 a month, so $22 is a significant fraction of my payment. I would be much more accepting at, say, $10 a month for the highest tier.

 

I have no interest in UVO beyond the 12 month free trial period. I guess the Niro's modem would be entirely useless. I wish there was an independent Niro app with more useful features. I would have the Niro's modem enabled through my own plan and use it.

 

For some reason, my UVO app has been failing a lot recently, giving me a "System cannot process your request." error. With this poor reliability, it's not worth anything to me. Anyone else getting this error more recently?

 

Never have seen it, are you connecting broadband or wifi?

Try wifi.

Greg

 

It seems to happen more often in the mornings, when servers are likely busier. I am using my home wifi, not LTE. This is problem started happening more when Kia changed the look of the app a few weeks ago.

 

On my Kona it turns on the climate control for 15 minutes and can be repeated as many times as you like, it should be similar for the e-niro.

 

How do you get the Niro to connect to your wifi? Must have missed that...

 

The app is connected via broadband or wifi to the Kia servers, which then forward the command to the car by a low speed cellular network.

The app NEVER and CANNOT connect to the car.... I assumed most people know this since you can be far away from the car and use the app.

Greg

 

well, yeah...I have read that other vehicles can connect to a user designated SSID like a home network and thought that maybe I'd missed something on the Kia...

 

Yes, some cars have a wifi hotspot ability, usually from a sim and a cellular radio inside, but another hotspot capability is the ability to repeat wifi it receives as a hotspot, normally you use tethering mode on a cell phone, but I have never heard of a remote control car app going direct to the car.... umm wait a minute, I think the tesla uses an app and I think it connects via wifi, from phone to car directly, used for opening the front trunk, and also I believe the "come to me" feature...

So I guess there is about every permutation out there! But not for the Kia... it's missing stuff on its cellular connection and at least the US models have no wifi at all in any capacity.

Greg

 

He's talking about the car itself connecting to your home wifi. I have owned a car that did this. In this way, the connection to your car via the app could take a much shorter path, when available, over the local wifi and not directly involve external servers which have proven themselves to be unreliable. Now this would only work in the park at home scenario (which is probably most of the time for many of us), but some smarts could be incorporated to switch to communicating via the cellular network if a local wifi connection from the app to the car couldn't be made.

 

Yeah, sort of...

I get the car connecting to the wifi, but in our case, it only receives commands over the cellular broadband as we all know.

It would be nice to have the additional capability, but it would only be advantageous if the app could command the car directly, as opposed to the commands coming from a Kia server.

Again, there are indeed vehicles that can do this.

Greg

 

Hint to Kia if they are watching (unlikely), I might even pay for an upscale UVO service tier, if it included an app that would let me talk directly to the car via my home wifi...other than being overpriced, I wouldn't pay for UVO currently because it has a bad record of connecting to my car.