Kia Reviews

According to Kia, this message is most commonly displayed if any of the following conditions are present:

• The EV battery’s charge is too low
• The temperature of the EV battery is too high or too low
• The temperature of the electric motor is too high.

The smart money suggests you should report this to the dealership either now or at your next service. That way, the Kia technicians can figure out what happened and how to prevent it happening again.

Along with the warning on the dashboard, the car will also limit its performance to protect major systems. That’s why it refused to accelerate and would not go beyond a certain speed.

Plenty of makes and models have glitches with their touch-screens and other on-board functions. And it would seem Kias of this vintage are no different. Problems include the touch function becoming unresponsive and the entertainment unit even deciding for itself when to turn on the music or make a phone call!

Ultimately, you may need to replace the entire head unit, but at that point, you could go with something aftermarket that offers more features and better sound.

But before you do that, try this: Next to the volume or tuning knob on the central display unit, there should be a small, round indentation. By pressing this with something small but pointy (like a ball-point pen tip or small knitting needle) you’re effectively resetting or rebooting the unit. The screen will momentarily go blank, but when it returns, you might find everything working again. But while this may restore things back to normal, the symptoms may pop up again over time as this is known as a soft reset, not a hard reset.

It would also be worth checking with your Kia dealer to see if the factory has issued any software upgrades for your car that might make things work more reliably.

In the good old days, cars had a wire (cable) linking the accelerator to the engine. When you stood on the throttle pedal, the cable tightened and pulled open the engine’s throttle. It was too simple to last, of course.

Now, in the interests of emissions and fuel economy, most cars use what’s called throttle-by-wire technology. In this case, the throttle pedal sends an electronic signal to the car’s computer, and the computer then sends a message to the throttle to physically open. If any tiny thing goes wrong with the sensors, wiring or computers that operate this system, you wind up with the very problem you’re seeing.

The good news is that this should be covered by your new car warranty and, therefore, is Kia’s problem to fix.