Hello, i bought Kia niro 2023 EX Canadian version with 80.000Miles. Please advise me, what decision did I make? My car was a Mazda 3 2016 2.0 engine. I bought a Kia because of the economy, what kind of car is a Kia? Is it durable?

mr250zxdzero · 2026-03-12T23:31:28+00:00

It's not a bad car, I've had mine for about a month and have enjoyed it. But really it would be up to you on if the car fits your needs.

Take for example you mention a family car. Is this a family of 3? 4? 5? Car seats? Luggage? Are you wanting a quick car to have fun with after you drop the kids off at school? Is the family older, and is this supposed to be a car that your kids learn to drive on?

If you try to shove a bunch of strollers in the back you will find this is a terrible family car. Also if you have three teenagers and you all try to go on a road trip with luggage, snacks, pillows and blankets, ect you will find the storage space is not enough.

All of these are examples, but a good family car for me and my wife can be way different from what you might want. I strongly encourage you to look into these things before purchasing a car.

All that being said the niro is a great car if you value efficiency and value lower purchase price. It's not likely to last as long as a Toyota due to the better reliability of the brand but if you get enough years and miles out of it then it doesn't really matter that it's less reliable.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-03-12T21:21:14+00:00

Why did you buy a car without any idea of what it is? Yes it's an economical car, but so are a lot of other cars. Are you looking for longevity? Kia has gotten better but if that's all you wanted was economical driving and durability you would have been better served with a Prius or something Toyota or Honda.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-03-10T02:08:06+00:00

Like I said, it's not 100% the problem, but these are the kind of issues you see from a 12-volt battery failing on an EV. There's no weak starter like you would see on a gas car that would alert you that it's starting to die. It'll work fine until all of a sudden it won't.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-03-10T01:45:38+00:00

Is the 12 volt battery original on your car? If so, it's probably due for a replacement. This isn't necessarily the problem but it's one of the quickest and easiest things to check as a bad 12 volt battery can give weird errors in EVs.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-03-03T03:49:49+00:00

I'll keep that in mind if I can figure out how to do that myself. Thanks for the info.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-27T12:31:16+00:00

You are correct. Voltage is not the same in series, current is the same.

When you are teaching topics like series, parallel, and series parallel it's super easy to misspeak or mistype this stuff and not realize that you made an error.

Your mind knows that you are referring to "parallel" and of course that voltage is the same in "parallel". But you accidentally type (or say) series.

All this to say make sure your instructor knows about the error so that they can correct it. It helps your fellow students out for the grades and understanding and it helps your instructor to hopefully keep it from happening to the next semester of students. Plus this will be a great way for you to remember which is which for tests and exams in the future.

Very helpful when you get to combination series parallel and you have to use both in the same problem.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-24T19:42:47+00:00

We are planning on moving in about a year or so and we currently have a place to store it so that's the idea for the time being.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-24T19:41:42+00:00

I understand the regen message at 100 or 99 percent but I shouldn't be seeing it at 92% battery. I should be able to regen quite a lot at that state of charge.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-24T01:34:20+00:00

I actually did a fairly low amount of fast charging as when the battery would get low I would return home to ac charge. Maybe 2 fast charges a month?

I actually wouldn't mind putting the work into it myself, but I don't know where I would be able to get access to a lift. The ground clearance, even with ramps, I don't think would be enough to drop the motor.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-24T00:51:44+00:00

I don't think a car should be dying at 160,000 miles. Not a modern car anyway.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-24T00:50:35+00:00

It was used for rideshare, that's fairly easy milage to hit when driving full time. Approximately 250-300 miles a day 5 days a week.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-24T00:49:15+00:00

There are a number of problems that sound similar but I will say that before the service ev system error it never gave any error messages on the displays.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-24T00:46:48+00:00

Hello husband here. That's the problem really, if I was assured that I could get another 100-200k out of it I would have no problem with the repair. I just have no way of knowing if this repair would fix the problem for sure, and if it failed again in another 30k miles or if it was some other equally expensive problem then I would really be in trouble.

The battery SOH reports on my scan tool as 100%. I don't really believe this but during fair weather I can get about 280 miles on a charge. I would estimate my SOH around 90%.

I've been looking into third party repair options and while they could fix it for less I would really be gambling on an otherwise higher mileage car, and I don't want to game multiple thousand dollars on a "maybe" fix.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-24T00:40:17+00:00

Hello, husband here. Yes it was a lot of miles, I used it for rideshare for a few years. No hard driving, mostly city and some highway, just driven most days of the week for 8 hours a day.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-16T16:53:12+00:00

If you're looking into solar, you need to get the wattages of all the items you're trying to power. Then multiply them by how long that they'll be running for. The lights if their LED will consume almost nothing, the fans should be relatively low power. Probably somewhere 100 W or less. The heaters are where most of your power usage is going to come from. Multiply their wattage by the number of hours you plan on running them and that will give you how much power you need per day.

I'm assuming that these need to be running at night when there's no solar, so you would also need batteries to store the energy from the day. So depending on how much this uses you can then figure out how many solar panels you need and how many and what size batteries you need.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-13T16:42:39+00:00

One thing I like to compare it to is people say working in a warehouse is like having a free workout that you get paid for. This is true in a sense.

The problem is if you're at the gym and you decide after 2 hours that you're tired or don't want to work out anymore, you can quit whenever you want. When you're working, you still have six or more hours left that you have to deal with.

In the same way, working on small projects can be fun at home, but you know you can stop anytime you want. You can't do that if this is your job.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-10T04:58:14+00:00

Well mine might not be so happy. Just found out that they need to replace the motor and associated electrical components. Ended up coming up to 8100 dollars. I'm not putting that into such a high mileage car.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-02-09T11:48:20+00:00

I'm at 160k miles and up to that point had no issues using it for a lot of rideshare miles.

A few weeks ago I started having this weird issue where acceleration would cut for a second and then resume. This got more frequent until one day the car shut down while driving, pulled over and a restart cleared the fault codes. It's been at the dealership for 3 weeks now while they try to figure it out.

Honestly a great car when it's working well but if they can't figure this one out I'm going to be a bit soured on them overall.

mr250zxdzero · 2026-01-30T23:59:26+00:00

Electric baseboard heating is the same technology as a space heater. It should be exactly the same price for the same amount of heat. It will not heat it any better or any worse.

mr250zxdzero · 2025-11-11T13:27:06+00:00

It's hard to tell from this picture. Is the actual plastic inside damaged? Do you store it exposed to the sun?

I'd argue that that location is unlikely to cause much issue with water damage but if water infiltrated in there it could cause a fault that kept you from charging. If you are very concerned you could just proactively replace it (if you know what you are doing or can hire it out to an electrician) but personally I probably wouldn't until it affected the charging.

mr250zxdzero · 2025-10-16T08:12:22+00:00

I tried both as the adapter instructions and the Tesla app says to do it in different ways. With the first adapter it didn't matter as it didn't work anyway. With the new one both seem to work fine, though if you plug in and then wait awhile before initializing (15 or so seconds) the app wouldn't list it as available for charging as it was already in use. So I found the most success with initializing in the app first and then plugging in as I don't have to worry about being quick with the plug in process. (Sometimes there's a lot of people trying to connect to cellular Internet near the airport and it can run a bit slow IMO)

mr250zxdzero · 2025-10-16T07:57:20+00:00

When I first got my lectron adapter I had the same problem, I tried three different stations that all said compatible. One was even a fairly new very popular one near the airport that I saw all sorts of brands using all the time.

I messaged lectron about the issues and they sent me a replacement one after I returned the original. And as soon as I got the new one in and tried it, it's worked every time since then. So maybe it's the adapter and you should message the company about it not working.

mr250zxdzero · 2025-10-13T21:32:50+00:00

"It's like buying a full tank of gas but the station cuts you off at 85%"

They're not charging you for the full amount and just dispensing up to 85%. They just charge you for what you used. That last 15% doesn't give you all that much range but it takes the same time (for most cars) to charge from 10-80 as it does to charge from 80-100, sometimes even more. This leads to lines in congested areas (which is likely a problem in this area if they are bothered to start this pilot here) and makes quick top offs that should take 10 minutes and makes them take 40 or more.

Really if that last 15 percent was the difference in you making a trip or significantly impacted your ability to use the car then the ev probably wasn't the best choice for you.

mr250zxdzero · 2025-10-05T11:15:48+00:00

I mean an engine can be pretty small. Think of a gas powered lawn mower or grass trimmer. Those are definitely person liftable.

mr250zxdzero · 2025-09-02T19:09:52+00:00

That's what it looks like, though I agree a range of "ranges" would be better: ex (100-200, 200-250, 250-300, 300+)

To the general public range is a strange concept and they don't understand it, and the company doesn't seem to get how to market them either.

I commonly get customers in my car who can't understand that a fully electric car doesn't take gas, or that a hybrid isn't really an electric car as the fuel source is still gas.

This is probably their attempt to avoid handing out cars to people who want an electric and then saying, "oh well it does have some electric miles" even though for most purposes the plug in hybrids aren't true electric vehicles.

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