Hi there.
I drive a 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5, which you
very well may already know because I've been something of a booster for the car.
I was one of the first people in my area to get one, likely
because I put a deposit down for one the moment I heard about it.
The styling is very much my jam.
I've been a fan of Hyundai and Kia for a while.
It seems like they're doing some really innovative stuff.
The 800 volt battery architecture and incredibly fast
DC fast charging means it's a pretty futureproof car,
and it's the class of vehicle I wanted, so it was kind of a no brainer.
And over the last three and a half years,
I have had a lovely ownership experience
and virtually nothing has gone wrong with the car.
Literally nothing has gone wrong with the car
except its original 12 volt battery failed.
Over January I replaced it.
This did mean I had to jump the car with a jump pack a couple of times.
To me, that's no big deal because I keep a jump pack and I know how to do that.
But I understand other people might be, uh, more troubled
when they go out to their car and it's dead.
So I'm just going to lay my cards
on the line that to me, that's not a big deal.
But to other people, it might be.
But literally, that's
the only thing that has happened to the car in the time that I've owned it
That is until two months ago, when the letters ICCU
reared their ugly head.
If you've done any research into these cars,
you may already know about the ICCU and how problematic this little bugger has been,
but I haven't wanted to make any sort of video on it
because I didn't really understand how prevalent this is.
And Hyundai and Kia have claimed that it's only affecting 1% of cars.
And, I didn't have any reason to not believe that.
Well, now I have reason to not believe that.
And before you think, oh, that's rich, you didn't care until this happened to you -
Oh, wait, there's more.
My brother has a 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 6,
and about a week after this happened to my car, it happened to his car.
And both of us had the software updates that Hyundai has trying to be
patching to hopefully make this problem not happen.
Actually, for me, the timing was fairly suspicious
because I had the update like a month before this occurred.
That's probably just a fluke.
But anyway, Hyundai's response to this has been really, really bad.
They're bungling this in all sorts of ways.
And Hyundai, you really need to get on top of this
before you have influencers talking about their bad exp -
Oh wait, too late for that!
But I'll tell you what, if you get manual battery preconditioning added
for those of us that have 2024 and older Ioniq models,
I'll make a video right away thanking you for that
and explaining how awesome it is that you've listened to your customers.
So that's my little ultimatum here for you.
I don't know if you call in an ultimatum,
but I'll be nice to you again once you do that.
But for right now, I'm letting everybody know about
just how badly you are handling this cuz it's bad.
Let me tell you what I think Hyundai needs to do.
The real problem is there's a parts shortage,
replacement parts are back ordered
and that meant I didn't have my car for a little over a month.
Now. In fairness, my dealer gave me a loaner.
But we'll talk about what happened to my brother because.
eeh!
But so my experience wasn't all that bad, but still,
I was without my car for over a month,
and my loaner was an Elantra, which fine,
but it's not electric, so, you know,
couldn't use my charging station or cheap fuel.
Yeah, bit of a bummer.
Anyway, I'm going to talk about that.
But what's really annoying is Hyundai and Kia are making these cars still.
Their factories are churning them out real fast, which means these parts
are being produced in numbers,
but they're building them into new cars
rather than slowing production at the plants
to take care of all the dead cars that are at dealers.
I know that capitalism means Hyundai is not going to slow production,
but come on guys!
So let's back up to when the incident occurred.
And I'm going to explain when this happened to me,
because it was surprisingly similar
circumstances between my brother and myself.
And that might be helpful information for either engineers at Hyundai
or just other people who have these cars.
And I'll also explain what the part actually is and why
if it weren't for the parts shortage, I wouldn't
consider this that big of a deal.
So the ICCU, it stands for Integrated Charging Control Unit
and it's a module that sits underneath the backseat.
And it's a pretty impressive piece of engineering.
This one part handles the DC to DC conversion,
so it takes the high voltage battery pack
or the traction battery pack voltage, which is near 800V
and converts it down to the 14 ish to charge the 12 volt battery.
It also does the inversion for the vehicle to load function,
and it is also the onboard battery charger,
so it basically handles electricity.
This one thing handles it all.
And what's happening is
it seems to be from what I've heard,
there is a MOSFET, a type of transistor inside of there
that will short out
when a voltage spike occurs
or something, I don't know, but when it shorts out
it blows the pyrotechnic fuse inside the unit
and then your car will be disabled because effectively
the equivalent to this thing for an internal combustion engine car is the alternator.
And so when it fails, the car can no longer charge the 12 volt battery.
And because all the computer systems run off of the 12 volt battery,
it gives you a warning right away that you need to pull over
and your car is going to die soon.
So it's a major failure when it happens.
I want to be clear it disables the car,
but if the part were at the dealer,
this would be a 3 or 4 hour fix. So
it wouldn't be that
terrible of an experience if parts were available.
But parts are not available because they're very backordered
and Hyundai is not being forthcoming on why that is.
The most up to date information you can get is from Reddit,
which is ridonkulous. So...
strike one.
But, what happened was and I was away from home when this happened,
which was annoying, but turned out to be fortuitous
because of the loaner situation.
I was backing down a driveway.
Actually, I had just been charging the car.
Sorry, I wasn't just charging the car. It was charging overnight.
I was staying away from home, but it was at 79%
And I was backing down a driveway.
I believe just before I shifted into drive,
I heard the pop of the pyrotechnic fuse.
For the - just so people know, I've heard it's very loud.
It's not that loud.
I honestly thought something just shifted in the cargo area.
It wasn't until a second or two later that it went DAHDAHDAHDAHDAHDA
and all, you know, the car starts freaking out and I realize, oh,
that's what that was.
So in a way, it happened in the best possible circumstances for me.
I wasn't on the road... because it just happened
I just pulled up the driveway and called Hyundai roadside assistance,
and they sent a tow truck right away, which took the car to a dealer.
That part of the experience went fine
and thankfully I have no issues to ...
Nothing bad to say about Hyundai roadside assistance
and I was not charged for any of this, so that's good.
But the same, basically the same thing happened for my brother.
He had just turned on the car, and either - he doesn't remember
if he was in reverse or if he was about to shift into reverse.
But both of us had this happen right after turning on the car.
And I don't remember
if he had charged his car the night before or not.
So. Sorry.
If I find out, I'll pin a comment.
And so when when the failure occurs, your car is going to be disabled
until it gets the replacement part.
Now, Hyundai has been trying
to issue software updates to fix this problem.
I should have known that's not going to work
because, you know, my mom and dad have a Chevy Bolt,
and they tried so hard to get software updates
to magically fix the physical defect in the battery pack before they realized,
yeah, you can't have software fix a physical defect,
which is probably what's going on in the case of the the modules.
Likely there's a quality control issue in somewhere in the supply
chain, and Hyundai and Kia are just not being forthcoming about it.
I don't know, that's all speculation, but the important thing is
it happened.
So now I'm going to talk about the Hyundai
customer care experience and how crap it is.
Now, I want to be clear, I had no problems with my customer care agents.
Everyone I either spoke to over the phone or wrote
via email correspondence was lovely, but they can't do anything.
And I don't know if that's because the people
I was talking to weren't trying though I suspect it's just
Hyundai doesn't have any systems in place which helped this happen.
The reason I say that is because
here's how I found out my car was fixed:
I called the dealer because the loaner they gave me; the paperwork
I had indicated I needed to renew it.
So I said, hey, I think I need to renew the loaner.
What do I need to do that and they said, oh, your car is fixed.
You can come pick it up any time.
We were about to call you,
they made it sound like it had been fixed for a couple of days.
I'm not going to litigate that.
The important thing is my customer care
rep had no idea that the car was fixed,
and it gets even funnier because about five days later,
I got an email from her saying,
we are still waiting on an ETA for the part.
I'll give you an update as soon as possible. So
the case manager, the case number,
the dealer apparently does not do anything
with the customer care cases.
It's mind numbing
and you can't talk to the customer care people aren't, like,
trying to figure out for you, you know, where is a part.
How soon can we get a part there?
They were waiting for an ETA from the dealer.
Every time I would talk to them, they would say, I've called the dealer.
They don't have an ETA yet.
I'm like, why don't you have a way to contact
whatever parts department within Hyundai sends these parts to dealers.
And as you know, it's just maddening.
So the customer care people, they just don't know what's going
on, and it's really, really frustrating that they.
It's just like, what systems are in place here
to be on top of this?
It's utter madness.
And what gets even better.
And this is why it's really “fortunate” that this happened to both me
and my brother, because we get to talk about how stupid these systems are.
My car failed a week prior.
His car got fixed a week before mine did.
Explain that!
I think I can explain that - the customer care people
literally do not have any sort of queue system
going to make sure that the cars that have been broken
the longest get their parts the soonest.
I mean, I'm happy for my brother that he got his fixed first,
and I had a better situation because I had a loaner.
But again, maddening.
This whole situation was just like
[frustrated noises]
Why is everything so broken?
Why is the world so broken?
I get really annoyed at customer service failures
because I used to work in the hotel industry
and it was my job to fix people's problems then and there.
Like my job was to figure out how to fix things
that might explain something about why I make the videos that I do.
But anyway,
it's just
so frustrating that
the world is so crap as far as how these systems work,
and there really isn't any sort of ownership when there are problems anymore.
It's just pass the... pass the thing
on to the next person.
It's really frustrating, but I want to,
I need to talk about what happened to my brother
because in his case, it's even dumber.
I think I mentioned
I was away from home when this happened to me,
which ended up being fortuitous because I was not very close to the city of Chicago and the dealer
that it was taken to was, I would call rural
ex urban at best, and they had plenty of loaners to give.
I know that my dealer that I normally go to,
it's pulling teeth to get them to give you a loaner.
And my brother, who lives near
San Diego, couldn't get a loaner.
Now Hyundai, when that happens, will tell you
rent a car and we will reimburse you some amount for the rental car.
But he had a hell of a time
getting that reimbursement because the customer care
agent that he was working with either was fired or quit
or went on vacation, and it took like ten days
for Hyundai’s systems to like - he kept calling
and they were like, oh, we're waiting for your for your representative.
It took like ten days for them to realize,
oh, you've been waiting on this for ten days.
We're going to send you to somebody else.
It's so bad.
He did get his rental fees reimbursed, but it's just like.
Nobody seems to care that
the car that you bought and you have warranted is now broken.
And you should try to make the experience...
In the hospitality industry, we call this service recovery.
And when there is a failure, you need to execute service recovery.
So that way you make it better.
And well, Hyundai doesn't know how to do that
and they need to get better at that.
So that's basically what I wanted to make this video about.
I don't know whether or not Hyundai
and Kia are, you know, if they've gotten to the bottom of this problem
yet, which is more of the annoying things,
we don't really know what exactly the problem is.
They're not really talking about it.
There is a NHTSA
complaint or, campaign or, you know,
I don't remember the details, but like, it's been recalled several times
because this disables the car and they've been trying to fix it,
but the fix needs to be new parts,
and they need to make new parts, which are hopefully fixed.
Because the other thing is, a lot of people have had this
failure happen multiple times.
And so it's kind of like, well, Hyundai,
until you give us some engineering explanation for what was happening
and when you figured out how to fix this problem
and what part like, you know, manufacture date is after that point,
we're all just in the dark playing a fun
little game of roulette with this part.
So I heard rumors that,
the version made after the last couple months, like,
probably the one that I have in my car, is a revision, but I don't know.
And, you know, I'm not about to tear out the back seat to actually look at the part.
I mean, it might not be that difficult, but I don't care that much.
It's not like I'm going to get them to replace it anyway.
This is just all sorts of bad.
And, Hyundai, you gotta...
You got so much stuff you need to take ownership of and fix.
Now, I'm giving Hyundai grace here because Hyundai and Kia
were very brave to move to an 800 volt architecture
and electronics, which can handle the 800V.
It's it's more like 750,
but there are voltage spikes from the motors and stuff.
Electronics that can handle that voltage are kind of rare.
And who knows what supplier they're using to get these parts.
And there's probably just a quality control issue,
but they're not being public about it because they don't.
Of course, they want to be hush hush about there's this problem,
but it's very annoying because it means everything is just speculation.
So yeah, Hyundai and Kia.
But I speak mainly of Hyundai because I have the Hyundai version.
They're like 90% great, but the 10% that's left,
they need to have some soul searching and just figure this out
because man.
The worst thing is just being in the dark about this
and the fact that it really seems like they're just trying
to push this under the rug
and they shouldn't, because they've made an excellent car
that has a known problem that nobody even knows
if the if it has truly been fixed yet.
We know the software updates don't seem to help
because my car was up to date when this happened.
So and it's just unfortunately,
you know, it's kind of hard for me to recommend a used Hyundai
Ioniq 5 or E-GMP car right now, just because who knows.
With the old ICCUs when this is when this is going to fail.
And also one thing that I don't know
how many people know about Hyundai and Kia
is that their really great warranty only applies to the first owner, so if you buy a used Hyundai,
you don't get that ten year, 100,000 mile powertrain warranty.
It's I think knocked down to five year 60.
I'm going to fact check this before I post the video,
but this was the case for a long time.
So that's a point against buying a used one.
But the bigger issue is until you know,
until Hyundai
explains, we know what this problem is, we know how to fix it.
And also, hopefully they would extend
warranty coverage on this part for longer than whatever
the typical warranty is.
It's hard for me to recommend getting a used Ioniq 5 right now.
I think the new ones, from what it seems like,
probably have a revised version of this part, but I have also -
I believe there have been some 2025s that have had the ICCU fail. So
[sigh] yeah.
So that's all that I have for you today.
I am pretty sure that that covers everything.
And to be clear, part of why
I didn't talk about this until I got my car back.
I've had it back for 2 or 3 weeks now.
I've just been busy catching up on stuff.
I didn't want to try to pull my weight around and make a video about,
oh my car is dead and try to get this sped up in any way.
I wanted to know what the experience is actually
like for most people that have this happen to them.
And it's great to know that how quickly
you're going to get a replacement depends on where you live and the customer care people just do not... “care”
about when this happened to you.
They don't seem to have any way to prioritize, to... to triage,
to get parts where they should be.
It's just, you know, what Hyundai?
You need to fix this. And
I it's kind of
just it's difficult to recommend the cars right now until you figure this out
and you’re public about what you figured out,
because right now everybody's just in the dark
and waiting for one day to hear that pop and the car to go nuts
and for you to need a tow truck.
So anyway, thanks for watching.
I'm going to keep updating you on the car now that I've had it repaired.
You know, it's back to normal.
Nothing seems amiss.
I tested the vehicle to load function just to make sure that that worked.
I don't know why it wouldn't, but everything else seems to be working fine.
And also, I should explain,
I suspect, the reason the original 12 volt battery died
so early is because for the first year, the,
software that was on the ICCU would let the 12 volt
battery get quite low before it woke up
the high voltage system to recharge it.
And after that update there,
I can see when it's charging the 12 volt battery
because the shutters, the active grille, shutters open up
and there's an orange light on the dashboard, and it happens
way more frequently than it did the first year that I bought the car.
Like after year one, after this software update, it now
tops up the 12 volt battery like twice within a workday.
So I think they've probably largely fixed that.
I don't know that for a fact, but,
I suspect that's why the original battery only lasted three years.
But it does seem like Hyundai and Kia
have some 12 volt battery management problems,
which is quite strange because my mom and dad’s Chevy Bolt,
we only just I changed it for them.
The original 12 volt battery was there until this spring,
so it went eight years on its original 12 volt battery.
It does have an AGM battery from the factory.
Maybe that's the only difference, but I'm skeptical
that AGM is really that critical for electric cars.
A lot of people will say they all need to have an AGM battery (that's absorbed glass mat).
From what I understand about lead acid battery chemistry and the fact that
if you keep it topped up in charge, they don't really wear that much.
I'm kind of skeptical about that, but whatever.
It's just another point to say that Hyundai and Kia have.
Something's weird about the way they do the 12 volt battery management,
and that's been a known issue for a long time.
I don't know whether or not they've got that fixed, but
that is largely a software thing, I think,
and it seems the way it's handling it now makes more sense.
But, we'll see.
I bought the cheapest Walmart battery
knowing that who knows how long it's going to, it's going to last.
And it's it's easy for me to replace it.
But also because I had the ICCU failure happen,
I don't know whether the dealer
it was sitting at for a month waiting on this part
bothered to disconnect the 12 volt battery.
And they... I still have the original battery.
Actually, that reminds me,
when my brother got his car towed to the dealer,
they refused to diagnose it until they replaced the 12 volt battery,
which I have no idea why. Like,
the dealer that
my car went to was just like, yeah, your ICCU’s failed.
I'm like, I could have told you that.
But his dealer was like, no,
we can't diagnose it until we get a new 12 volt battery.
And they didn't have the exact part, so he didn't even get a diagnosis for 3
or 4 days, yet still got his car fixed before mine.
That felt great.
Anyway, thanks for coming to this therapy session with me.
I still really like the car and if Hyundai and Kia
fix this problem and add manual battery preconditioning,
I would wholeheartedly recommend it.
But right now.
It's a bit harder to recommend.
I'll just put it that way.
I wouldn't say you should not consider it.
I have decent faith that eventually
they're going to take care of this problem for real
and explain to us what happened.
But we've been in the dark about this for far too long,
and their strategies for trying to fix it haven't worked.
And the parts are still incredibly back ordered,
despite the fact that they're building new cars
so that just, you know, salt in the wound right there.
If they could just slow down the factory by like,
I don't know, 10% get get some more of those ICCUs out to dealers.
That's how you earn goodwill, Hyundai. You need that.
I don't know if you've heard about this other electric car
manufacturing manufacturer and, what poor goodwill does to sales.
Might want to keep that in mind.
Anyway, bye.