Overheating Kia/Hyundai J-1772/Charge Port Problems

There seems to be a strange number of people who are trying to DIY a fix to the charge port overheating problem on Kia/Hyundai GMP platform cars like our EV6. Normally I’m totally down with fixing things yourself if you can, but all of these cars are under warranty right now. There is no reason to try to DIY a fix here.

Having experienced this problem ourselves, I can say this from experience. You want to go to the dealer and get it resolved properly. I pushed on this with the dealer because I didn’t want to hide a problem for the next few years. Selfishly, because it should just work. The worst outcome is that the root cause gets hidden until the car isn’t under warranty. Then it’s an expensive problem for me to pay for. But, maybe the more important reason to bring it to the dealer is so Kia/Hyundai are forced to recognize that there’s a problem with their J-1772 charge port design.

It’s easy for me to blame Kia here because we have two EV. When one works on all our EVSE, and the other doesn’t without dialing it back to 24A – one of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn’t belong. We also tested it with public Level 2 chargers, the Mach E was fine, the EV6 wasn’t over 32A for any extended period of time. More than a few hours on the charger and the car would just stop charging and send us an email. Not ideal :).

I’m not going to claim that it was easy to get the dealer to actually fix the problem. It took a few trips and multiple conversations over a couple months. First, we had them apply TSB ELE-283, which is supposed to throttle charging back when the temperature gets too high. Obviously that didn’t work. TL;DR the problem went away when the port was replaced. Which is fairly damning, right?

I didn’t try cleaning it. That is the kind of solution that I don’t want to do. That is an unreasonable ask for end users, and exactly the kind of thing that hides the problem from Kia and makes it my expensive problem in the future. I don’t understand why some people get tribal about topics like this either. EV6 is a great car, acknowledging that there is a problem with the port design is good for all of us, including Kia/Hyundai. Pretending otherwise doesn’t do anyone any favors.

All that said, this is just my opinion. If you want to make scrubbing the J-1772 port and gun at your home and the public charging locations part of your maintenance ritual. Thank you?