Hello everyone, this is John again and today I'm going to go through the
KIA app for the Niro. I think that applies to the nero hybrid plug-in hybrid and EV. The app has
changed quite a bit in the last few years since I bought the car and this is the current iteration.
When I first downloaded the app, and tried it, it basically didn't do anything for the plug-in.
About everything that you could control was for the EV only. Now, this is what the basic app looks
like. You have the status, status was last updated at about 20 till 5:00 this evening. It has the
remote start, currently engine is off as you can see on the right hand side. There's a button for
starting the engine and for stopping the engine. There are some pre-selected temperatures, so if I
do a remote start, I can have it cool down to 68 warm up to 75 or I can set a custom temperature
and turn on defrost turn on heated seats and so forth. It also shows me the battery state.
As you can see there the battery is marked as "not charging". That means that the cable is plugged
into the car but it's not currently charging. If the cable is not plugged in the battery state is
"unplugged". The battery currently has 58% charge and if I click on the charge it times the time it
shows me here is for a 240 volt charger. For my 120 volt, it'll take about four times as long.
I can remotely lock the car. I can remotely unlock the car. It currently tells me the car is locked.
I can turn on valet alerts I can also honk the horn or and flash the lights if I wanted to. It
tells me where and when my upcoming services are scheduled. It gives me a remote start schedule, so
if I left every morning at a certain time I could have the car started in the winter time
have it warmed up and it would be ready and nice and warm when I go out there. For the
EV, I know that it will do the heating on the charging circuit rather than drain the battery
I don't know what it does for the plug-in hybrid. There's a remote charge schedule. So,
what happens for me is pre-pandemic, when I drove into work every day, I would leave at 7:00 in the
morning. Every Monday through Friday, I would have it fully charged by 6:50. On the weekends,
I'd have it charged by 8 o'clock, and be free to go out and run errands. I don't have any
curfew alerts, but I assume this is if you have children and you can have it warn or tell you when
the car is being used outside of those hours. There's speed alerts, for the same reason.
You can have it tell you when you get above a certain speed. Geofence lets you set borders
around certain areas, so you could find out when the car leaves home, when it gets back home,
when it gets to school, when it gets back, when it leaves school and so forth. The "My Trips"
gives you a list of by default all the trips you took in the car for the last 30 days.
As you can see, it is not the fastest as far as fetching this information from KIA's servers.
What it shows here are the trips I've taken. It doesn't have today's trips and I'm not sure
how often it updates the web server. It also has a slight disconnect when it comes to range
this 3.1 mile trip should actually be 3.5 miles the mileage listed here matches the mileage
that's reported by the ODB reader ODB2 reader and that seems to be off by about 13 percent.
The mileage on the odometer is correct but the mileage here and the ODB2 are off so this range
you have to basically multiply by 1.13 to get the proper ranges. This 3.1 mile would be 3.5 miles.
Strangely enough, if I go back to the mileage at the top, from the odometer, that is correct.
Evidently they take two different paths. If I want to update the data, I just click on the
the circular arrows and it'll go pull all the information from the server
and provide up-to-date statuses for the various pieces. If I want to do any commands from the app,
it takes about 20 seconds to send the command wake up the car and get the command back.
Since the car is locked right now, if I click the unlock button it tells me that
it will send me a notification when the car is unlocked, so I could go off and do something else.
If I tried to do another step, it tells me I can't because it's busy doing the unlock operation. If I
sit here and wait, it will then update and there it goes and says the car door is now unlocked.
At the bottom of the screen, there is an icon for locations and for account information. The
account information is your the status of your subscription to the service,
you get three years free when you buy the Niro new. The locations tab will show you
all of your charging stations, gas stations, places of interest and KIA dealerships in the
area. If you click on those buttons, it will actually put little pins to show you where
they are. So that's the basic capabilities of the Niro app. I believe that here that you get free is
like US$30 a month. Considering how little the app does, it really isn't worth it for me, but
I'm not the kind of person who remote starts the car, I'm not the kind of i'm not the person who
starts who wants to have the heater started in the middle of the winter, I'm used to having
to go out start the car scrape the windows let the car warm up and then drive. I'm not
used to starting the car going out 10 minutes later and then doing all that work. I believe
the limitations for starting the car here are the same as they are for my wife's Chevy Equinox.
It will only run for 10 minutes and then it will stop. You can start the car remotely
twice before you have to get in the car and then start it. If it's a very cold day
you will get a little bit of benefit but I really haven't seen a need for it personally yet.