I had incorrectly assumed that software updates in Kia vehicles would be just as awful as they’ve historically been in most other major vehicle manufacturers.
With my move to Iceland, I’ve purchased a couple of electric cars, one being a Kia Soul EV. This was the first car we purchased due to availability and I just so happened to find one with all of the features I wanted.
When I drove it I was somewhat disappointed that the head unit software looked about ten years older than the Soul EV I had previously rented here during one of my trips to sort out immigration paperwork and details about my move. The dated look of the infotainment software had me reaching to switch to Apple CarPlay mode 100% of the time.
In the spirit of the ol’ “turns out” style articles – Kia offers free software updates that are labeled as being “navigation” updates but actually update the entire infotainment stack. There’s even a mac app, so you don’t have to mess around with a Windows VM:
My car immediately feels more modern and while the update took absolutely forever to flash onto a USB drive and then the car, the car was actually still drivable throughout the update process.
Post MY22 Kia EVs all support incremental OTA updates so the pains of this USB-driven process are probably lessened but in reality the USB process is probably still faster (even though it took ages still).