Sure that’s fair, and I can’t even say that’s because they’re a legacy car maker, but my polestar has that shit locked in. I think some of that is because they’re legacy, and some are just stupid decisions or lack of respect for the driver. I just wanted to highlight some things I personally fine “wrong” with Kias in my experience. I won’t get one again
it saves mirror and seat positions, but not audio or temp/fan settings
This is kind of standard for cars, isn’t it?
The drive settings (snow mode, etc) doesn’t persist for some reason either.
And this makes sense because Kia wouldn’t want the car to be unintentionally stuck in snow mode by default. Folks who don’t pay attention to settings wouldn’t know what was wrong, and it follows a golden rule of software: 99% of users will use the defaults.
It sucks that it isn’t configurable, but most everything you listed is just infotainment software issues, and part of the “car software shouldn’t be so complex and proprietary, and rely more on physical knobs” general issue. We should be able to configure stuff it like we want, but for some reason car software dev is particularly awful, and here we are.
It fishtails constantly if its remotely slippery out in the winter.
And again, I’d guess this is from stock, low-friction EV tires. Which are awful in winter. This is just a guess though.
You’re right, it is standard for cars in general, but that’s my point. I can’t say it’s the case for all modern makers, but the one reference I can go off from is polestar and it has all that shit figured out and it’s a new EV company (mostly/kind of at least). I don’t know if its the same for companies like Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, etc. There’s no reason not to change the dash settings when that’s all stored in a computer now unlike back in the day where the head unit and heat controls with separate entities entirely from the seat settings. It just seems like a hold over from how things used to be done.
I know the shit I laid out are all updatable with a software update to add toggles and I’ve heard guesses that that fishtailing is an issue with torque vectoring or something (bad tire choices could be part too, but it drives fine in snow). Its still a problem for a legacy vehicle maker that should have it more figured out than they do right now.
Sure that’s fair, and I can’t even say that’s because they’re a legacy car maker, but my polestar has that shit locked in. I think some of that is because they’re legacy, and some are just stupid decisions or lack of respect for the driver. I just wanted to highlight some things I personally fine “wrong” with Kias in my experience. I won’t get one again
Again, playing devil’s advocate:
This is kind of standard for cars, isn’t it?
And this makes sense because Kia wouldn’t want the car to be unintentionally stuck in snow mode by default. Folks who don’t pay attention to settings wouldn’t know what was wrong, and it follows a golden rule of software: 99% of users will use the defaults.
It sucks that it isn’t configurable, but most everything you listed is just infotainment software issues, and part of the “car software shouldn’t be so complex and proprietary, and rely more on physical knobs” general issue. We should be able to configure stuff it like we want, but for some reason car software dev is particularly awful, and here we are.
And again, I’d guess this is from stock, low-friction EV tires. Which are awful in winter. This is just a guess though.
You’re right, it is standard for cars in general, but that’s my point. I can’t say it’s the case for all modern makers, but the one reference I can go off from is polestar and it has all that shit figured out and it’s a new EV company (mostly/kind of at least). I don’t know if its the same for companies like Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, etc. There’s no reason not to change the dash settings when that’s all stored in a computer now unlike back in the day where the head unit and heat controls with separate entities entirely from the seat settings. It just seems like a hold over from how things used to be done.
I know the shit I laid out are all updatable with a software update to add toggles and I’ve heard guesses that that fishtailing is an issue with torque vectoring or something (bad tire choices could be part too, but it drives fine in snow). Its still a problem for a legacy vehicle maker that should have it more figured out than they do right now.