What the Kia EV9 Gets Right and Wrong About the Future of Cars
Kia’s three-row EV borrows several good ideas from Tesla, but the devil is in the details.
What do you get when a company with more than 50 years of car-building experience imitates Tesla’s software? The Kia EV9. The Korean three-row SUV has many of the same capabilities Tesla built its brand on: regular over-the-air updates, downloadable torque, a powerful phone app, and an in-car experience defined by screens and software. That makes Kia a leader among legacy automakers in adapting to the software-defined future.
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The feature set alone, though, isn’t enough to make the EV9’s software competitive with Tesla’s. Eleven months into our yearlong test of a 2024 Kia EV9 Land, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with its digital tech. I love the idea of these features but hate the slow responses and unreliable performance. Three stories from living with our EV9 capture the highs and lows of Kia’s software.
A Smartphone App That Works at Dial-Up Speeds
The Kia Access app has been a fixture of my daily routine ever since temperatures in Michigan fell to the wrong side of freezing in November. Remotely activating the climate control from anywhere—the kitchen, the porcelain throne, an airport shuttle—just five minutes before getting in the car means you’re always greeted with a toasty cabin, seats, and steering wheel.
I’ve also used the remote climate control as an ersatz Pet mode for our Brittany spaniel while we grab dinner on road trips, and occasionally to remotely lock and unlock the doors, open the frunk, view the car’s surroundings through its 360-degree camera system, and precondition the battery to maximize range in cold weather. There’s an even longer list of features I’ve only tried once, such as scheduling charging and departure times, activating valet mode, and adjusting the charging settings. Shy of opening the trunk and rolling down the windows, the Kia Access app can do pretty much anything the Tesla app can.
Annoyingly, though, it regularly takes a full minute and sometimes even longer for the app to deliver a command and confirm it worked. That confirmation matters because the requests fail more often than you’d expect—I’d estimate 5 percent of the time. The slow round-trip relay is particularly irksome if you’re trying to do two things at once, like precondition the cabin and the battery, because the app can only process one instruction at a time. It also intermittently gives errors that the conditions haven’t been met to use remote commands and bizarrely won’t update the battery state of charge when the car is plugged into a DC fast charger.
Prior to living with the EV9, I thought of a phone app for your car as a novelty—a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have. While the past 11 months have made me see the value of connecting to your car from anywhere, Kia Access’ glacial speed compared to social media apps and web browsing makes the whole experience feel behind the times rather than futuristic.
A Trip Planner With Bad Plans
It’s easier to take a road trip in a Tesla than in any other EV. A lot of credit for that rightfully goes to the 30,000 Superchargers that Tesla has installed in the U.S., but all that hardware is made even more powerful by the best software in the auto industry. The trip-planning algorithm baked into Tesla’s navigation system takes all the pressure of figuring out where to stop and for how long off of the driver. You can count on it to guide you to fast, reliable chargers with a strategy that minimizes your time plugged in and maximizes your time putting miles in the rearview mirror.
By comparison, the EV9’s trip planner is overly simplistic and prone to giving bad advice. Its suggestions are so flagrantly and consistently bad that I’ve never actually followed the guidance. On a road trip to Tennessee, the nav system told me to make my first stop at a painfully slow 50-kW charger. On another drive to northern Michigan, it wanted me to visit two chargers, initially stopping with 43 percent charge remaining, when I likely could have made the trip with no stops at all.
The charging recommendations suffer, in part, because there’s no way to personalize the algorithm. You can’t manually adjust key settings like how frequently you want to stop, which charging networks you prefer, or how far you’re willing to drain the battery. And although Kia’s planner knows how many ports are available at a station, it doesn’t know if those stations are delivering reduced power or if the connectors have been vandalized. Rivian solved this problem with its ingenious Charger Reliability Score, which uses data logged from customers’ charging sessions to grade public fast chargers. Its trip planner then prioritizes A and B locations.
So much of the discussion around long-distance EV travel focuses on range and charging speeds, but the more urgent and easier short-term fix should be focused on helping EV drivers find the best stations for their needs with minimal stress and effort. Rivian, Porsche, and Mercedes-Benz have come close to the high bar set by Tesla. Many more automakers, including Kia, are failing their customers by only offering the bare minimum. It’s why every time I’ve taken a road trip in our yearlong EV9, I’ve planned my own stops using the PlugShare app, a winner of a 2025 MotorTrend Best Tech award.
The Day the System Went Down
Personally, and for Kia owners around the country, frustration with the company’s software peaked with a major outage in February. The system went down the same day my family and I returned from a warm-weather getaway to a 17-degree Michigan embrace. As we boarded the airport parking shuttle, I opened the Kia Access app to warm the cabin of our EV9 Land that was parked a few miles down the road, but every attempt to trigger a remote start returned a failure notification several minutes after I initiated the command. Adding injury to insult, we arrived at our cold car and found that the right rear tire was completely flat from a pinhole leak.
A message appeared in the app the next day: “We are experiencing difficulties with our systems, some functionality might not be available, we regret the inconvenience caused.” As technical director Frank Markus prepared for his own Tennessee road trip, we also discovered that the EV9 itself was affected. Although the navigation system still provided simple point-to-point directions, it wasn’t connecting to the internet and thus couldn’t provide traffic information, alternative routes, or charging-stop recommendations.
The outage was a tipping point for many Kia owners frustrated with the app’s flaky performance. On Kia forums and Reddit, owners vented that they were paying as much as $20 per month to use a buggy app that now wasn’t working at all. Several griped that their calls to customer service went unanswered. A few who got through lamented that they were given minimal information and dismissed with the cold, unempathetic responses of a corporate call center.
The outage lasted a few days, yet even after the notice disappeared from the app, connectivity remained broken. I tried poking the pinhole reset button for the infotainment system to no avail and eventually found a fix on Reddit where a user advised pulling the fuse for the modem then reinstalling it and tapping a button in the car’s settings to reconfigure the modem.
Kia’s corporate office didn’t do itself any favors by essentially staying quiet during and after the ordeal. Couldn’t the company have sent an email or provided a pop-up message in the app linking to an apology, and explanation, and guidance on how owners could get their cars and apps connected again? In the absence of official information, rumors filled the void. Some websites reported that the outage stemmed from a hack that compromised customer data and shut down Kia dealers’ ability to access systems they need to sell cars.
Shortly before this story was published, Kia provided MotorTrend with the following statement: “Offering a premium and seamless user experience to our customers is important to Kia America, and we regret the recent Kia Access outage that some owners may have experienced. The temporary outage was due to a service disruption by a telecom service provider and was not identified as a security issue. Network services have since been restored, and we have provided a solution for the limited number of vehicles that may still be experiencing connectivity issues to the Kia Access app.”
How hard would it have been to tell that to customers without our access before the rumor mill started churning?
A Warning to the Rest of the Industry
The Kia EV9 is a canary in the coal mine for automakers that will eventually have to follow Kia down this path if they’re going to deliver competitive software. Before they can implement such ambitious and radically different software, these companies need to commit to moving quicker, not just in writing code, but also in responding to the inevitable bugs. That the EV9’s annoyances are still occurring in a car that’s been on sale for more than a year creates the impression the EV9 was shipped before development was finished and that the glitches are a permanent fixture of the experience.
It’s a shame because Kia gets more right with its software than most legacy automakers. The standard, though, isn’t set by the companies Kia has competed with for decades. It’s dictated by the startups that have the highly skilled coders, agile teams, and organizational focus to create software that’s as intuitive and powerful as what we’re used to on our phones and laptops. Kia might be in the front pack chasing after the breakaway automotive software leaders, but it has a lot of work to do to close the gap.
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?
- Did Our Yearlong Kia EV9 Do a Crime?
- 1,100-Mile Road-Trip Roulette: Kia EV9 vs. Two Toddlers, One Dog, Single-Digit Temps, and Holiday Travelers
I fell in love with car magazines during sixth-grade silent reading time and soon realized that the editors were being paid to drive a never-ending parade of new cars and write stories about their experiences. Could any job be better? The answer was obvious to 11-year-old me. By the time I reached high school, becoming an automotive journalist wasn’t just a distant dream, it was a goal. I joined the school newspaper and weaseled my way into media days at the Detroit auto show. With a new driver’s license in my wallet, I cold-called MotorTrend’s Detroit editor, who graciously agreed to an informational interview and then gave me the advice that set me on the path to where I am today. Get an engineering degree and learn to write, he said, and everything else would fall into place. I left nothing to chance and majored in both mechanical engineering and journalism at Michigan State, where a J-school prof warned I’d become a “one-note writer” if I kept turning in stories about cars for every assignment. That sounded just fine by me, so I talked my way into GM’s Lansing Grand River Assembly plant for my next story. My child-like obsession with cars started to pay off soon after. In 2007, I won an essay contest to fly to the Frankfurt auto show and drive the Saturn Astra with some of the same writers I had been reading since sixth grade. Winning that contest launched my career. I wrote for Jalopnik and Edmunds, interned at Automobile, finished school, and turned down an engineering job with Honda for full-time employment with Automobile. In the years since, I’ve written for Car and Driver, The New York Times, and now, coming full circle, MotorTrend. It has been a dream. A big chunk of this job is exactly what it looks like: playing with cars. I’m happiest when the work involves affordable sporty hatchbacks, expensive sports cars, manual transmissions, or any technology that requires I learn something to understand how it works, but I’m not picky. If it moves under its own power, I’ll drive it.
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