Gearbox oil, you might want to proactively change it ...

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KiwiME

KiwiME

Well-Known Member
Just a note to Niro owners that Kona owners who have changed their gearbox oil have all found that it comes out jet black. It seems to be caused by fine metallic dust, no doubt originating from break-in of the gears.
There's a discussion starting around here if you're interested.
 
Does the Niro EV even have a gear box I guess is what I'm thinking. Hence the question lol


Ahh you mean the reduction gear. That makes more sense than gearbox.
 
And when you say gearbox, I think: R-1-2-3-4-5

Not a reduction gear. I think you can see my point. Kia calls it a reduction gear as well, not a gearbox.


sheesh... Leave your attitude at the login screen.
 
Kevin Smith said:
And when you say gearbox, I think: R-1-2-3-4-5
Not a reduction gear. I think you can see my point. Kia calls it a reduction gear as well, not a gearbox.
sheesh... Leave your attitude at the login screen.
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Look, he is doing a you a big favour giving you this information!! You should be grateful, and not criticize him for his terminology, which is actually correct. It IS a gearbox, and has only one gear reduction instead of multiple ones as is common in ICE manual transmissions.
 
LOL whatever. His description was vague and at least in Canada terms, YOU should know this. A gear box is a transmission, not a reduction step.

I see you have no common sense as well. Man internet forums are just full of toxicity the last few years.

Defend your "Well-Known Member" all you want. Common sense and normal nomenclature says the description was vague if even ONE person didn't know what he meant.

The first bit of attitude in this thread was "Well, this is an EV group so yes it applies."

Period.
 
transmission is usual term for something that has several ratios.

gearbox is normally literal, a box with gears, maybe more general.

If you guys would not "spar" (both of you) the rest of us can say "Thanks for the tip", have not seen any reports on the Niro, but mechanically we should be similar to the Kona.

Greg (barely known member)
 
Greg Elmassian said:
I think my action will be to find the filler plug and sample some of the oil. I appreciate the tip.
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If you're going to all that trouble lifting the car and removing the underside panels you may as well change it. There's not going to be any variation among samples here, no magnet == black oil. You won't find any large particles because they all get ground up at the expense of unnecessary bearing wear.

You can use Redline MT-LV in the 0.946 litre bottle. You'll need 2 to get the required 1.00 to 1.05 litre, or make up the difference with any other GL-4 gear oil such as ATF. Torque plugs to 33 ft-lbs dry. Any questions, just ask.

One Kona owner in SoCal had his changed at Riverside Hyundai. They billed it as a diff oil change because there was no other appropriate line item. Seemed a bit over the top at $135 though.
 
Hello, I've got a 2019 Kia Niro EV with ~31,000 miles on it and I'm considering asking my dealer to do the reduction gear oil change. Has anyone in the US (or California) had this done? Will my dealer be clueless? Approximate cost?
 
Greg Elmassian said:
I think my action will be to find the filler plug and sample some of the oil. I appreciate the tip.
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This is probably the best move -- I saw the dirty gear oil in the pics in this thread and the inputs from others that it better be changed sooner rather than later. So with 95k miles on my 2019 Niro EV, I changed mine yesterday.

Thanks to a couple youtube videos to help, it was easy (and I'm glad I didn't pay several hundred bucks (based on some other inputs on this thread) to a dealer to do it -- but as I watched the old gear oil come flowing out I was expecting it to be filthy but it was really more light brown as if it wasn't very dirty at all.

So now I'll probably do it at 150k miles again, it takes 1.1 quarts of synthetic gear oil which was only $13 on Amazon and I got 2 so I have plenty to spare.

The longest part was removing and replacing the cover underneath the compartment, which has 7 10mm bolts and about 12 plastic trim panel fasteners.
 
scooterjm said:
Hello, I've got a 2019 Kia Niro EV with ~31,000 miles on it and I'm considering asking my dealer to do the reduction gear oil change. Has anyone in the US (or California) had this done? Will my dealer be clueless? Approximate cost?
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22kMiles and I brought it in for a service appointment around 13k. Anyway they looked at the reduction gear oil and said it was a little darker than it ought to be but said it was fine still fine. So I suppose YMMV
 
Noting that from all the evidence collected so far from initial Kona oil changes, the "YMMV" part is more applicable to the assessment of the oil condition rather than the actual condition. Fully 100% of the approx 30 changes reported from 3,000 km to 160,000 km are described as "black", but that's only apparent if a quantity of oil is placed into a container. A sample on a finger or Q-tip will have a black instead of a gold tint but won't otherwise look contaminated.

The small handful of reported assessments from dealer's service departments have varied from "there's no oil in an EV" and "it's black but still has life left in it", all the way to "we'll report this to Hyundai engineering". It's alway possible that any random service tech might have a basic knowledge of tribology but I can only say based on my own background that in general "black oil" in a simple gear reducer is indicative of an abnormal operating condition and that it occurs from very low kms makes that assessment definitive. So, it's not the depth of blackness that is an issue but more the fact that any blackness indicates the presence of an underlying engineering defect. The four used oil analyses we have on the OEM oil backs this up as iron and aluminium levels are described as "elevated".

We also have some evidence that the internal magnet Hyundai/Kia (actually MOBIS/Transgear) install is oddly non-magnetic. So, they have addressed the need for this in the design but somehow have failed in the execution.

It's early days yet but recent evidence is suggesting that adding a supplemental magnet can keep the oil clean in 2 of 3 cases. I'll stress there are very few reports of gearbox failures that appear to have resulted from this defect but not it's not zero. It's also not clear that this is related to or causes the "tapping/wheel of fortune noise" but running contaminated oil is not going to help.

For what's it's worth there is recent evidence from several other interested Kona owners that placing 20mm dia neodymium disk magnets on the outside of one or both stock plugs does provide an effective magnetic field inside the gearbox. That's an easy DIY, very inexpensive and warranty friendly.
 
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