Battery Backorder? Since Nov '21

[SeattleLou]

Good to hear the iceberg is starting to move! I got an email last week from Customer Care that my battery is due in port to LA on 4/25. Can't understand why some get detailed info, vs single pieces of info. Anyway...

[BEC]

Well, I have an appointment to get the dealer to look at the battery SOH on July 1st.

I just ran it down to 3% this afternoon (that was not the plan, but that's how it worked out) which got me into flashing turtle mode before I got home. But...since we're finally sort of starting summer here in the Puget Sound region, I was able to recharge it while well above 50 degrees F. The GOM said 52 miles once the charge completed (we've been seeing 47 to 52 miles first thing in the morning for some weeks).

SoulSpy says the SOH is 58%, and that one cell has a deterioration of about 46% (cell 24). If the dealer gets something like this on July 1st I can at last start on the battery replacement wait. I plan to hang on to the car while waiting (gasoline is well over $5 a gallon around here, and 50 miles of range suits most things we need to do). As long as it stays somewhere near there we can get by for some time.

But getting a new battery with over 100 miles of range, as some others have reported, is something I look forward to. I will certainly treat that new battery more carefully. No more charging to 100% every time. But if charging to 80% gives ~80 miles of range, that will make me quite pleased.

More when I know more.

Oh, in case anyone is curious, the car has a little over 56,000 miles on it at the moment.

[jray3]

Hi Bernard,
My ‘16 with 82k miles is entering week 2 at KIA of Puyallup, WA. Diagnosed at 65% SOC on day 2 in the shop, we’ve been awaiting a response from Corporate since. My car is is usable, which is good since there’s been no improvement in the lead times for battery replacement. This is after I first saw SOH fall below 70% 6 months ago, though SOH then rose with lighter usage and a lot of time sitting at 100% SOC! I’m betting it’s going to be a full year between what should have been a warranty trigger and actually receiving a remedy…
-Jay
SeattleLou, I’m suspecting we have the same service advisor?

[jray3]

Warranty replacement of the traction battery finally approved today! Fortunately it is uniform capacity loss without sick cells, so we’ll just drive it till the replacement battery comes in. Only downside of being at 82k miles now is that the replacement pack will be barely broken in when the warranty expires!

[BEC]

Just back from Kia of Puyallup and the appointment I posted about above. It was interesting in that even though the appointment was about poor range and needing to document battery health, the first thing they did was test and got 76% state of charge and 77% state of health. That was a surprise since I’d gotten 58.8% state of health from SoulSpy just last night and the GOM estimate on a full charge in the morning lately has been 47-49 miles.

I got back into the car suspecting that they’d reset the BMS before reading it (as they are told not to in the Service Bulletin about this) but when I turned the car on it showed the same GOM value (24 miles) that I’d seen when I came in. I turned the car off, and it reported 54% state of charge. I went back in and basically asked what the heck was going on and that their diagnostic tool couldn’t possibly differ that much from the SOC the car displays. After some discussion with the folks at the service desk one of them went back to talk to the technician and we found out that he had checked the 12V battery!! While I’m glad the original 12V battery is pretty healthy, that wasn’t why I was there.

A couple of moments later the service manager came out, apologized and said they’d do the correct check as soon as their EV tech got back from lunch.

A while later the car disappeared back into the service bays and not too long after that the service manager came back to me and told me he’d started a Techline case as the SOH of the drive battery was 58.9% per their instruments. So…0.1% higher than what SoulSpy told me last night. He said once it’s authorized, and he said that typically takes 24 hours, they’d order the replacement battery. There was no discussion on how long it might take to get in.

This being Friday, I don’t expect that I’ll hear anything about authorization until next week. I’ll make it a point to call them Tuesday (or maybe swing by, I have another appointment in the area on Tuesday morning) to see if they’re proceeding and maybe get a read on how far away the battery might be, time-wise.

In the end, the trip today did exactly what I had hoped it would do — it at least initialized the battery replacement process.

The car has 56,700 miles on it now. We will keep driving it as long as we can in the meantime.

More when I hear more.

[jray3]

Wow Bernard, and to think this error was just a few daze after KIA of Puyallup finally approved my battery replacement. You’re making me want to go back and re-read the previous service records for a 12V clue- they had claimed a much higher SOH than my SoulSpy readings 5 months ago, effectively delaying the replacement decision all this time…

[Kemo]

Hell-o all My 2018 has been at the dealership since Dec 12 2021 with 76,600 miles. No information when will it arrive.

[jray3]

SOULSPY says I’m now down to 40.5% SOC and range has been falling like a rock, rarely above 50 miles at 100% SOC in the past week, so I’m turning it in for a rental tomorrow, which I’ll keep for the months ahead till my SOUL is whole. Took all week to get a car lined up due to low inventory at Enterprise. Nope, they wouldn’t turn over the keys for that EV6 on the lot!

[Nigel]

I've had my replacement battery for a couple of months now on my 2016 Soul EV. Took 7 months to arrive but now it's here I've been monitoring the battery over 10 full cycle battery charge discharge cycles from 100% down to about 20% and back up to 100%;

First cycle gave me a range of 189km compared to the max I'd ever seen on the original battery of 169km. Thought it might just be calibration of the BMS but I have driven the car enough now with a mix of highway, side streets, AC on, AC off etc to confirm that this range is real with 100% coming in at 190 to 192km. Simple math on the range almost points to a 31kWh battery???

I don't know what the dealership installed - the dealership says its a direct replacement of the original 27kWh battery - but it clearly has more capacity than the original battery. Has anyone else had this experience? Either way I'm pretty happy with the outcome and it will be interesting to see how the range changes in the fall/winter.

[IanL]

It seems KIA are now using the new technology cells (introduced in the 2018 MY 30 kWh batteries) for replacing the original cells in earlier 27 kWh cars.

I think this results in the nominal capacity of the battery increasing from 27 kWh to 28.8 kWh, because the 27kWh batteries have 96 cell-pairs, and the 30 kWh have 100. 30*96/100 = 28.8.

Range values on the GOM reflect historic driving patterns, current and historic weather as well as the SOH of the battery, so comparisons have to be treated with caution. Having said that, my 30 kWh battery, now over 4 years and 40,000 miles, is still at about 102.5% SOH, so it is reasonable to assume that the new cells are in the region of 103%. This would suggest that your new battery could be 28.8*103/100 = 29.66 kWh.