Hyundai's Upcoming App Allows EV Owners to Adjust Their Car's Performance

author: Vineeth Joel Patel   

Owners looking to get more performance out of their gasoline engine usually have to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours finding and installing the right components. Even then, there's no guarantee that everything will work and that it will equate to more power. It sounds like owners of an electric vehicle from Hyundai or Kia won't have that issue thanks to a new app.

Tuning Your EV With Your Smartphone

Hyundai Motor Group announced the development of "smartphone-electric vehicle pairing based performance adjustment technology," which can be simplified to a smartphone app, that will allow owners to adjust their electric car's performance through their smartphone.

The seven performance features that owners will be able to adjust through the app include: the vehicle's maximum torque, ignition, acceleration, deceleration, maximum speed limit, regenerative braking capacity, responsiveness, and energy use. For consumers that don't want to play around with all the available settings, the app also provides optimized settings based on a designated destination. It can do so by studying the remaining distance and the amount of electricity required to make the trip.

There's also a sense of sharing with the app, as Hyundai claims users can share their specific settings online and even download another user's setting to try out. Hyundai will also recommend specific settings for users that's based on road conditions and location.

How Hyundai's Tech Is Special

Being able to tune an electric car's performance on the fly isn't new. Tesla has offered "Ludicrous" mode on its vehicles for many years. That, though, is controlled through the vehicles' touchscreen. Hyundai's app would be unique, because, well, it's an app and no one else has anything like that on the market at the moment.

Hyundai sees its app being popular with rental cars, as well. If you happen to get into an electric vehicle from Hyundai or Kia, you'll still be able to port your customized settings over to the rental car. While some might be concerned with the idea of having personal information, even if it just performance settings, being shared with a rental vehicle and one's personal smartphone, Hyundai claims it will encrypt the information using blockchain technology.

At the moment, the only electric vehicle that belongs to Hyundai Motor Group is the Hyundai Kona EV. Kia will introduce two electric vehicles in the future with the Kia Soul EV and the Niro EV. The South Korean manufacturer didn't provide a concrete date on when the app would come out, though, so it could be out in time before Kia's EVs come out. Hyundai Motor Group does have plans to introduce 23 electric cars by 2025, so a later date would make sense, too.

Vineeth Joel Patel

Joel Patel has been covering all aspects of the automotive industry for four years as an editor and freelance writer for various websites. When it comes to cars, he enjoys covering the merger between technology and cars. In his spare time, Joel likes to watch baseball, work on his car, and try new foods