What Did We Power With Our Kia EV9’s Battery Pack?
The Kia EV9 electric three-row SUV is many things: surprisingly quick, a comfortable highway cruiser and a capable family hauler around town. With its vehicle-to-load, or V2L, capability, it can also use its almost 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack to become … well, a battery capable of providing power for all sorts of things. We’ve used V2L power before in other vehicles, including our former long-term Ford F-150 PowerBoost hybrid, to provide juice for everything from a camper in sweltering heat to a Ford Mustang Mach-E. With access to that sort of feature again, what have we done with it?
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Not a thing. We polled our staff multiple times to see if anyone had made use of the EV9’s V2L power — we even purchased an adapter to take advantage of V2L using the charging port, thinking someone would — and no one has.
Is V2L a Useful Feature?
That depends on your perspective. No one on our staff using the EV9’s V2L abilities doesn’t automatically mean it isn’t useful, but it does speak to the sorts of situations where it could be and the things we’ve used our EV9 for. No one has taken the EV9 camping or tailgating, where the ability to power lights, cooking equipment or entertainment devices might be very useful.
For our video on the topic, I plugged in a smallish, older flatscreen TV, an Xbox Series X, the charger for my handheld tools’ lithium-ion battery packs and, oh yeah, a 1,200-watt studio light. If we had somehow lost power at our studio, we could’ve lit the set enough that viewers could still (unfortunately) see my face. Just-in-case power is another potential use for V2L power.
While I don’t really want to video game on the go in the back of an SUV, I think the charger is a better day-to-day use case. I generally keep a handheld inflator in my cars in case of loss of tire pressure, and being able to plug in and charge the inflator’s battery if it were to go dead while trying to inflate a tire — or before the tool was needed — provides me with peace of mind.
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How Does the Kia EV9’s V2L Feature Work?
With the available adapter, simply open the charging port, plug in the adapter, press the power button on the front of the adapter and then charge away. The EV9 is capable of providing around 1.9 kilowatts of V2L power in total, so as long as whatever’s plugged in doesn’t exceed that amount, you should be fine. Some electrical appliances draw more power at startup and may exceed the EV9’s capabilities; it will give an error message in that scenario. It’s also worth noting that items with heating elements — space heaters, electric grills — typically require more power, and possibly more than the EV9 can deliver.
Once everything is plugged in and assuming it’s all working properly, the EV9 will display real-time readouts of how much power is being provided and how much longer it will be able to provide that power. By default, the EV9 will cut power to V2L when the battery hits 20% state of charge, hopefully leaving you with enough range to get to a charging station if you aren’t near one. Owners can adjust that cutoff all the way up to 80% depending on their personal needs.
Higher trim levels of the 2024 EV9, like our Land trim, also include a household outlet in the cargo area. It will work in concert with the charging port adapter, but be sure to plug the adapter in first — opening the charge port door temporarily cancels interior V2L operation. Also, both outlets provide 1.9 kW total, not 1.9 kW each.
What About the EV9’s Utility Mode?
Utility Mode is separate from V2L and does not need to be activated to use V2L, but it is another useful, power-related feature. In Utility Mode, the EV9 can power things like the climate control and infotainment system using the high-voltage battery pack instead of the 12-volt battery when the vehicle is stopped. It may eat away at total range, but it keeps the 12-volt battery fresh and lets you run those features for significantly longer periods of time. Utility Mode would be very useful in a situation like a lengthy road-trip rest stop or a rain delay at a sporting event.
Should I Buy the EV9 Just for V2L?
We certainly didn’t, as shown by how little we’ve actually made use of V2L. The EV9 is not a Ford F-150 Lightning, which offers up to 9.6 kW of V2L power for jobsite equipment or emergency power for a home during a blackout. But the beauty of having V2L in the EV9 is that if we do need to power something critical, we might actually be able to.
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