Yahoo Autos Kia EV6 GT-Line AWD Long-Term Wrap-Up: Now that was a good year
Key takeaways:
The EV6 managed to be cheaper to operate than any gas-powered long-term test car we've tested
Its shape may not be traditional, but it's an eye-catching design that turned heads all year and doesn't make big compromises to utility
Kia's charging technology is superb, but that can only take you so far with today's troublesome and finicky fast-charging network
This one’s a hard goodbye. The long-term Kia EV6 GT-Line that’s been in our fleet is gone, and it’s going to be one we miss. In the end, we steamed on past the 10,000-mile mark, and while there have certainly been some unplanned dealer visits for updates and road debris, our EV6 proved reliable and a real joy over the course of a year.
While we had tested virtually every new electric vehicle by the time the EV6 made its way into our fleet, it represented our first chance at putting an electric car through a year-long test. The nature of typical weeklong loans for media simply can’t reveal the true ownership experience of a car, especially for EVs when charging is such a pivotal part of the experience/ordeal. That’s one of the big reasons why we wanted to commit to a yearlong test of an EV6. Thankfully, the Hyundai/Kia/Genesis E-GMP platform cars are heavy hitters when it comes to charging.
Read all Long-Term Kia EV6 updates here
But before getting into the public charging question, it’s vital to recognize the importance of charging at home. Some of us here at Autoblog have Level 2 chargers installed at our respective homes, and for those of us who do, the public charging infrastructure is almost a non-issue. Outside of road trips, no day trip around metro Detroit will require more range than the 274 miles our EV6 is rated for on a full charge, leaving folks to come and go from their homes without ever typing “EV charger” into Google Maps.
However, those who did require use of public fast-charging facilities found the EV6 to be a superb vehicle for such a use case. Its fast charging allows it to go from 20-80% in just about 18 minutes, and our EV6 consistently performed at its claimed abilities. We’d show up at the local Electrify America with competitors like the Ford Mustang Mach-E or VW ID.4 already charging and be done and gone before they finished. That may not be as exhilarating as winning a drag race, but it still feels like winning to us.
Where things got trickier (and annoying) is when the weather turned. Those who charged at home continued to do so without so much as being slightly perturbed, while those who charged at fast chargers found the wait times significantly increased. Unfortunately, our 2022 EV6 didn’t have a battery preconditioning system that pre-heats the battery to allow for ultra-fast charging straight out of the gate. You’d need to sit at a charger for a little while before the speed ramps up, but it more than doubled our typical dwell time at any particular fast charger. Waiting 40 minutes at an Electrify America or EVGo isn’t an uncommon wait for many EV owners, but when you’re accustomed to 20 minutes or less, the reduction in performance is extremely noticeable. Thankfully, Kia has since added a battery preconditioning system to newer EV6s and is even offering a software update on models that didn’t have it from the factory.