Charging Issue / warranty / certification

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chrislarsen3

Member
Joined
Nov 19, 2018
Messages
10
Hi All,

I'm really hoping someone can help here..

I have a 2017 Soul EV that I bought a couple weeks ago here in Chicago, it only had 3800 miles on it and it was sold to me as "certified".

It had been charging just fine on Level 1 at home and Level 2 at various locations. A few days ago I decided to try the charge timer feature so that it stops charging with my Level 1 house circuit when it gets to 100%. Then a couple days ago when plugging in, my wife noticed that just the middle light was flashing. I found out that indicates that the timer was set.. so I found that I need to deactivate the charging timer with the button. I pressed it down and reconnected the cable and it *still didn't work*. So i tried a bunch of combinations - deactivating from the infotainment screen "charging time" settings screen, from the UVO app, and still no luck.. Also tried to just activate the timer back on and set the time for very soon and watch it kick on - but it did *not* automatically kick on. No blue lights at all, but does read "Charger Error" on the infotainment console as well as in the dash in front of the steering wheel, when turning on the car. *Level 3 works just fine.*

So today I called Kia Customer Service and the lady didn't seem to have knowledge in the area, she just said it needs to be brought into a dealer. She looked for which one to bring it into, and found that those closest EV-certified dealer is in ROCHESTER, NY!

I'd love to be able to find the magic trick to reset the software / firmware / BMS somehow so that it forgets about the charging timer somehow, then just deal with the bigger issue of *this dealer selling me this car and marking it "certified" when they are not even certified and I don't have any [relatively] local dealer to service this car*. I feel like if I got a service tech from the Rochester, NY dealer on the phone with myself (if easy) and/or the service tech at my dealership, he could possibly (??) walk us through reinitializing or whatever.

I'm also worried that if I do send it out it will take a long time and then get it back in not as good charging speeds, which I've seen as a negative effect of getting the OBC replaced, but that was in the "Charging Fault" condition. Is that the same issue I'm facing? Is there something I should be requesting or ensuring in the fix?

Any suggestions out there??

Thanks!
 
OK, found out it was in fact the OBC failure many have seen. They're replacing under warranty. Found out that techs that are hybrid certified are capable of doing the work. I'm a little nervous that I'll get longer charge times with this fix but the service tech said they might follow up with a software patch that makes the charging inefficiency better again.
 
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On the MY2017 Soul EV there is no change to the charging time when you update or replace the OBC.
 
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