Vorner's random stuff

Some useful details about using the Kona EV

Almost a year ago, I’ve bought a Hyundai Kona EV. You can read a bit about the selection process in that old blog post.

Finally, I’ve found some time to write down a bit of experience with the car (having a kid and building a house are big time sinks). In this post, I’m going to describe few observations about how the car works. These can be used by anyone with this car (and probably similar cars) as kind of extra tips.

I hope to write few more posts about it soon, probably something about its range / consumption / charging and something about general impressions.

The car in question is 2022 Kona EV with the smaller battery (39.2kWh) and the lowest trim (called Smart in Czech republic), with the only addition of a heat pump and three-phase 11kW onboard charger. I have it in that bright blue color.

Storage space

On the first glance, the trunk space is tiny. Nevertheless, the car has a removable floor of the trunk. There are some Styrofoam boxes below it which are completely useless. If these are taken out, the floor can be moved one level lower, which adds more space to the main trunk and still leaves a spare-wheel well (but no spare wheel in it) under there to keep all the manuals, cables and warning triangles. Or, when really pressed for space, I’ve left the floor at home at occasion completely. The top cover of the trunk is also removable.

I’d estimate that all this about doubles the amount of trunk space. The shape is a bit awkward, but the access to it is good enough (it’s easier to fit backpacks than suitcases there).

Otherwise, the floor has harness hooks to fix things onto. The car came with a net, two tethers and a foldable box with a Velcro on the bottom that attaches to the floor. These are all small enough to carry around at all times and come handy from time to time.

As more storage space goes, the car came with a spacious roof box (which raises the consumption on a highway somewhat, so together with the small battery isn’t the best thing for long journeys).

Officially, the car doesn’t have a frunk (or front trunk), but there’s a big plastic decoration under the hood. Some people have taken it out and replaced it with an Ikea box. Alternatively, the lower Styrofoam box that was sitting in the spare-wheel well fits perfectly. This creates a bit of usable space there, but AFAIK is not endorsed by the manufacturer, mostly because possible heat coming from the equipment hosted below it (I believe the box directly below it is either the AC charger or the inverter).

Transporting long objects

I’ve been able to transport various thin but long objects with the car (see the note about building a house).

Anyway, if I was to transport skis to some place where they can be used, I’d probably opt for using the roof box. Having them inside the car for longer trip (as opposed to just bringing few pipes from the closest store to a construction site) would be awkward and the roof box is reportedly more aerodynamic than just skis tied to the top of the car.

The possibilities

As noted above, the car, while giving an impression of a small one (and being on somewhat smaller size on the outside, so it’s OK to get through cities and park in underground garages), can transport a lot with a bit of cargo tetris game when loading.

On one occasion, it transported 3 adults, a child in a child seat (have you noticed that a child seat takes more space than an adult occupant?), a pram, a child chair, luggage for all these people (including all the child-care equipment like spare clothes, diapers, … again, a child needs more luggage than an adult) and a bicycle. All of that inside of the car, without the roof box (that one was delayed on delivery).

Four adults and a child is also a possibility (though these had much less luggage, so there was no need for the tetris game that time).

However, getting two child prams into it would probably pose a serious problem.

All in all, as space goes, it can definitely work as a family car, but might impose some limitations when packing for a holiday, one can’t just take everything just in case.

To me it feels like a good compromise between a car that doesn’t feel huge in city streets while making it possible to load a family and reasonable amount of cargo for a holiday trip with little bit of care when packing. There’s enough space for the crew in the cabin not to feel cramped, but isn’t luxuriously wasteful.

Little features & quirks

Android Auto

The car (in this trim) doesn’t have a built-in navigation, but the screen can show navigation from a mobile phone. The easiest way to pair a phone to it is by connecting it by an USB cable. Nevertheless, once the phone is paired by the cable, it can be connected wirelessly (it might be possible to pair a phone in other ways, but I haven’t tried).

If multiple people share the car and both are present, it sometimes automatically connect to the wrong phone. It is possible to switch (even mid-drive), but the menu for disconnecting the wrong one and connecting the right one is hidden somewhere deep in the menu tree (if no phone is connected, it is easily accessible, but once it is connected, the same button leads to the connected phone).

Preheat options

Preheating a car before departure ‒ that is, before even approaching the car, during winter, is a very nice feature. This is possible for EVs because they have separate heater (some ICE cars have this too, but it is rather rare ‒ EVs don’t have enough waste heat, so they need to have a dedicated heater).

One can then just walk to a warm car with the snow or ice on it melted enough to be just brushed off instead of having to spend minutes scratching it off. Then just enter the warm car and go.

This trim doesn’t offer a mobile application to start the preheating (higher trims do), but there are two additional ways to start it.

One is by setting a schedule beforehand. This one works only when the car is connected to the charging cable at the time, but has the advantage of not draining the battery, it takes the power directly from the charger.

The other one is through the buttons on the key. It has decent range ‒ it’s possible to use this from a block house window at 8th floor when the car is parked somewhere in front of the house. The preheating is fast enough to be warm before getting from the 8th floor down to the car.

To use this thing, one has to first press the lock button (even if the car is already locked), followed by holding the „rotate“ button for 3 seconds (a button with a circular arrow on it, the only one that doesn’t have its meaning obvious just from the icon). This doesn’t work when the car is connected to the charger, which I find annoying.

Charge port locking

The charging cable locks when charging, both for electric safety and to avoid someone stealing it. There are two modes for AC (in DC it always uses the first mode), in one it unlocks after finishing the charge, the other one holds the cable until the whole car is unlocked.

Many AC stations don’t have their own cable, so own cable is needed (one is supplied with the car). As the AC station also unlocks it after charging is done, it is better to use the latter mode. In that case the cable would be held locked at least to the car and nobody can just carry it away.

Whenever the car is unlocked, the cable is unlocked for about 15 seconds (the charging is paused for this duration). This allows to terminate the charging session prematurely or unplug the cable before leaving. If you don’t unplug within these 15 seconds, the cable locks again. You can press the unlock button on the key again (even if already unlocked) and it’ll unlock it for another 15 seconds.

Occasionally, the car gets confused and forgets to unlock the cable. While there’s a mechanical emergency release puller under the hood, it’s not needed in such case. Simply playing with locking / unlocking / switching the mode a bit resets the car into sane state and it eventually unlocks.

Fog lights

For some unknown reason, the fog lights can’t be turned on when lights are on the automatic. If they are needed, the lights need to be switch to the „always on“ position first.

The Lane Follow Assistant

The car has two independent steering assistants. One of them (the LKA, Lane Keep Assistant) is enabled by default. It’s the one that first beeps when drifting close to the line, then it „bounces“ off it back into the line if the driver doesn’t react. The bounce is more of a nudge to the wheel than forcefully taking over ‒ if you want to drift over the line and hold the wheel firmly, the car won’t fight that, but if you don’t pay attention or even don’t hold the wheel, it’d prevent falling off the road.

The other one, LFA, Lane Follow Assistant needs to be enabled (by a button on the steering wheel) and tries to smoothly keep the car in the middle of the lane. It’s gradual, the more off-center the car is, the more force is applied towards the center. In this mode, the LKA almost never bounces (only beeps), since to drift over the line, enough force is already being applied by the driver to the wheel.

Also, a turn signal temporarily pauses both of these assistants, but it doesn’t disable them. Switching lanes need to be done manually, but once the car is safely within the other lane, they seamlessly reengage.

I’ve found the assistant very convenient (though my wife doesn’t use it, she says it interferes with her driving), reliable and predictable. It doesn’t try to fight me, but helps to guide the car through curves smoothly and makes it possible to check the mirrors or take a sip of a drink with one hand without drifting to the side.

It never did anything crazy and it is easy to guess places where it might give up ‒ in which case the force on the wheel simply disappears when the car is feeling my hands on the wheel, but would beep if it was unsure. Actually, it often can handle places which I’d expect it not to ‒ it knows to prefer yellow „construction“ lines, sometimes can recognize a pavement or series of traffic cones, is willing to go with a line on only one line for a short while. It can work in adverse weather conditions (heavy rain combined with fog in night ‒ reduced visibility and a lot of reflections).

The car has no dedicated sensors to recognize the driver holding the wheel. Therefore, it does so by registering steering moves of the driver. If I hold the wheel but keep driving in sync (or just let it drive with hands on the wheel), it doesn’t „feel“ the hands on the wheel and would occasionally remind to keep the hands there. It’s enough to just wiggle the wheel a tiny bit in such case.

Other assistants

There’s also an emergency braking assistant. That one is slightly more nervous than I’d like. In case a car starts braking in front of me and I start braking too, but use up a bit of the safety distance so I can brake more smoothly, it would start beeping at me even thought I know I’m braking enough. Nevertheless, it has never started „out of the blue“, it was always clear what it is being scared of and it has never actually reached the second phase where it would start braking all by itself. So it may be a bit on the overcautious side, but I keep it enabled.

I’ve turned off the rear-occupant alert thing. That one felt quite useless and annoying. It would remind to check if someone is sitting in the back seats. But as it only checked that the rear door were open previously, it would mostly just pop up every time no matter if there was one or the rear occupants were adults exiting all by themselves.

Auto-hold

This thing can be enabled by a button on the middle console. Then, if the car stops, it stays with engaged breaks and won’t move until the driver presses the accelerator pedal.

Without auto-hold, the car would start creeping forward if no pedal is pressed (I’ve heard this is emulation of how automatic gearboxes work).

I’d recommend not using the auto-hold at least at these situations:

Regen

The car can slow down using the motor instead of the brakes, generate energy by that and store it back into the battery.

Paddles and regen control

One can slow down by lifting the foot off the accelerator (or lifting it partially, to slow down less). The paddles under the steering wheel allow adjusting how much it slows down, from coasting at level 0 to strong braking at level 3. I personally use 3 in cities and slower traffic, 2 on highways and long stretches of roads with steady-going traffic.

Another feature is holding the left paddle. During the hold, the car will brake even more strongly and would come to a complete stop in a very smooth way (if held for long enough). Then it’ll activate a one-time auto-hold ‒ it’ll stay stopped after lifting the foot off the pedals and letting go of the paddle, but next time the car would act according to the previous auto-hold setting.

This is very convenient for stopping on traffic lights ‒ the stop is comfortable and smooth and the driver can take a short rest of the foot. Also, this activates a notification that the car in front starts moving, so if I stop paying attention while standing still, the car would remind me before someone behind me loses patience and uses the horn. This works for cars only, not traffic lights switching from red to green.

It’s possible to use the left paddle hold even when already stopped (by a brake pedal), which will still activate the one-time auto-hold. This is handy in a traffic jam that gradually slows down into a complete stop and then feels like it’ll take a while to start moving.

Behind the scenes

This is mostly out of nerd interest and has no direct effect on driving, but can be observed in the screen with the energy use report (regen shows as a negative number on the drive unit).

Even using the brake pedal engages the regenerative braking before using the friction brakes. Even the level 3 / the left paddle isn’t the maximum braking force the motor can exert, and if there’s a need to slow down more by the brake pedal, the car will take as much energy into the battery as it can.

The maximum regeneration power is the same as the acceleration power of the motor ‒ 100kW. From what I’ve heard, this is the case even for other Hyundai electric cars ‒ if it can do 150kW of acceleration (like the bigger-battery version of Kona), 150kW would also be the regen limit.

I believe this behaviour is part of why Hyundai is able to get really good consumption results. It is also of note that not even Tesla is this aggressive in regaining the energy ‒ their regen limit is lower than the acceleration limit and they don’t regen more on brake pedal, only by lifting the foot off the accelerator.

Some older EVs (or even older models of Kona) had a problem of not using the friction brakes enough ‒ they would use regen so much that the friction brakes would rust and would have to be replaced prematurely. I don’t have it confirmed officially, but I think this car is clever enough to sometimes prefer the friction brakes to keep the brake pads clean ‒ at least, after almost a year of driving, the brake pads are nicely clean and not rusty at all.

Driving comfort

I’m probably going to dedicate a more detailed post to this, but in short, the car is very nice to drive.

It’s far from a sports car. I would, however, describe it as agile. While it has „only“ 100kW of power, these 100kW are always at immediate disposition, no need to worry about current RPM, drive gear, turbo compressors, down-shifting, etc. Just a smooth pull all the way from 0 to maximum speed. This consistency makes it easy to change speeds when merging into traffic or switching between highway lanes of different speeds. There’s enough power to do all these maneuvers while fully loaded and going uphill.

Consumption, range and charging

Again, this topic probably deserves a separate post and here is only a very short version.

The car has rather small battery and somewhat slow DC charging. It compensates these to some extent by having low consumption.

It gets somewhere between 200-400km on a full charge, depending on many factors (amount of highway driving, weather, winter/summer tires, …).

All in all, it makes for a perfect commuter and errand car.

It is reasonably good for these shorter family trips ‒ going to a ZOO and back, one doesn’t want to spend several hours on the road to get there and back if the visit is going to also take only few hours.

The car has active battery cooling, so it’s capable of arbitrary number of DC charging sessions in a row. That makes it possible to take it for a 1000km long trip. Nevertheless, with this battery size and charging speed, one has to stop every 150-180km for 30-40 minutes and that makes it somewhat uncomfortable. It’s probably OK for one holiday a year, but not on regular basis.

On the other hand, if the destination is closer than about 1.5 of range, the charging doesn’t involve particular discomfort ‒ at such trip, taking a single 15-20 minute stop is something people often do anyway.

Overall impressions

I’d say that as EVs go, this one is somewhere on the low end of what might work as an all-around (and only) family car. Such use would involve some compromises here and there.

It can definitely work as the kind of „second family car“, but one that’ll likely do most of the everyday driving due to the comfort, ease of use.

If I was choosing a car now, I’d still probably go with this car. I might consider a higher trim (one that has the bigger battery and adaptive cruise control) ‒ these would eliminate the biggest compromise with long trips and, by the ability to actually use the roof box on long trips, the compromise in storage space.

On the other hand, I would probably not recommend the small battery version for people that do long trips often (the bigger battery should work fine there). In either case, I’d recommend going over driving habits to see how often you do a drive that’s longer than some 150 or 200km in one go.