Did Our Yearlong Kia EV9 Do a Crime?

On Friday, October 11, Motortrend technical director Frank Markus started our long-term Kia EV9 and found himself facing a black screen. The Kia’s 12.3-inch infotainment screen booted normally, but the 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster flanking it only showed the selected gear. He shut the car off, got out, locked the doors, then tried again. Still nothing. That meant no speedometer, no blind-spot cameras, no turn signal indicators, and no odometer, among other telltales and driving information.

Markus called me, the EV9’s chaperone, to report the issue and ask if I had any ideas. I knew exactly what he was dealing with because a couple months earlier, I’d experienced the same glitch. That first time, a Google search revealed we weren’t the only ones with this problem. I tried cycling the ignition and resetting the infotainment system via the pinhole button next to the volume control to no avail. The chatter on Reddit and Kia forums convinced me the EV9 wasn’t likely to leave me stranded, so I drove the electric SUV a few miles to a local park. EV9 owners had figured out that the fix was to turn the car off and leave it locked for about 20 minutes, which allows the affected computer to power cycle. Sure enough, when I returned some 45 minutes later, the instrument cluster was back to working normally.

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I relayed all that to Markus, who moves through life only slightly slower than the speed of light. He was attempting to start his weekend with a 100-mile drive, and he wasn’t about to wait 20 minutes for the car to (maybe, hopefully) reboot. Confident that he could make it to his destination, he set out with the instrument cluster blank.

Flying Blind

Driving without the EV9’s digital gauges is disconcerting at first. Glancing down to check your speed is so ingrained that you constantly find yourself looking at (and thinking about) the blank screen—an unsettling reminder that something’s not quite right. Losing the primary range readout in an EV makes any drive feel like you’re taking a risk, no matter how short the trip or how full the battery. And although we verified that the exterior turn signals still flash, you never quite trust that they’re working when there’s no visual or audible indication to the driver.

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There were workarounds for some missing functions. Pulling up Google Maps on Apple CarPlay using the infotainment display gives you a GPS readout of your speed, and the EV pages on the infotainment screen show estimated range and battery state of charge. Other features, though, were completely unavailable. Along with darkening the blind-spot cameras that show up in the cluster, the software glitch torpedoed the blind-spot warning lights in the side mirrors, and the Highway Driving Assist lane centering wouldn’t activate. Markus did discover that the adaptive cruise control still worked, but the first time the car ahead of our EV9 moved into another lane, the Kia accelerated to 100 mph. Toggling the speed adjustment up and down did nothing. The EV9 still slowed for traffic, and Markus easily canceled the cruise control to resume manual driving, but the Kia apparently has an innate need for speed.

And we got one final surprise when Markus made it to his destination. After leaving the car parked for an hour, he checked on it and discovered that, with the digital gauges now working, the odometer read 7,471 miles—the same as it had shown when he unplugged the EV9 earlier that morning. He had driven 112 miles by Google Maps’ measure, but the EV9’s odometer hadn’t registered a single turn of the tires. It’s like the car wanted to pretend the whole thing never happened.

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The Fix Is In

Two weeks after Markus’s adventure in high-speed odometer tampering, Kia mailed an official recall notice to EV9 customers. The letter notes that the nonfunctional instrument cluster runs afoul of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 101, which regulates controls and displays such as the odometer, speedometer, and turn signal telltales. Strangely, though, the recall report doesn’t acknowledge the more serious safety issues created by AWOL driver assistance systems or cruise control that accelerates to extralegal speeds. When we asked Kia about these problems, a company representative pointed out that customers have been advised not to drive an EV9 if the instrument cluster is blank and to contact Kia Roadside Assistance to have the vehicle towed to a dealership. In other words, don’t do what Markus did.

Today, nearly all EV9s should have the software update that addresses the instrument cluster issue. Our local dealer flashed the control module at our first service visit in early November, and the issue hasn’t affected our long-term EV9 since then. Kia has also delivered the software fix as an over-the-air update to EV9 owners with Kia Connect accounts.

The Mystery of the Missing Miles

We were left wondering, though, about the 112 miles missing from our EV9’s odometer. Were they gone forever? Could the now-erroneous odometer reading require its own recall? Have any EV9 owners taken advantage of a blank instrument cluster to discreetly put, like, 10,000 miles on their SUVs? And how would the plot of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off change if the odometer on Cameron’s dad’s 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California had failed to boot at startup?

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Kia had nothing to say on these topics, so I reached out to Jeff Garber, a regulations expert with automotive engineering consultancy Pilot Systems. While federal regulations require an odometer, they say nothing about how accurate that odometer needs to be. Automakers generally abide by SAE Standard J678, which states that odometers should be within 4 percent of the actual distance traveled, but that’s only a recommended practice, not a legal requirement.

Garber noted that Jeep and Toyota have recently recalled vehicles to fix faulty odometers, but in both those cases, the odometers stopped working permanently. The intermittent and temporary nature of Kia’s instrument cluster outage presents a different issue, and Garber is unaware of any automaker recalling a vehicle for an odometer that works but is inaccurate. He also says it’s possible our EV9 has a record of those 112 unregistered miles, as most cars store the odometer in the powertrain control module—and that module was clearly working for Markus to be able to drive the vehicle.

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A Simple Solution to Complicated Problems

Kia is hardly alone in these kinds of electronic headaches. The rise of the software-defined vehicle has been shadowed by the rise of the software-defined product defects. The consolation prize for enduring these annoyances is that the fixes are usually relatively quick and painless. In this case, many owners had their vehicles repaired without ever visiting a dealer.

That said, automakers would be doing their customers a service if they recognized that we’re living in the era of problems that can be fixed—at least temporarily—the same way we fixed computers in the late ’90s. “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?” In too many cars, rebooting the computers requires disconnecting the 12-volt battery, parking the car for 20 minutes, or pressing a cryptic combination of buttons that's not mentioned in the owner’s manual. How about a single button that just resets the darn things?

For More on Our Long-Term 2024 Kia EV9 Land:

• Can the 2024 Kia EV9 Electric SUV Replace a Gas-Powered Family Hauler?
• We Downloaded More Torque and New Features for Our Kia EV9. Was It Worth the Cost?
• Our Kia EV9 Charges Like a Champ—So Long as You Avoid Tesla Superchargers
• Why Did Our Kia EV9’s First Service Cost $322? Aren’t EVs Supposed to Be Cheaper to Maintain?