The list of benefits to driving an EV is long. There’s the effortless torque, the smooth power delivery, the tranquil highway encounter, the convenience of home charging, the reduced carbon emissions and the smug satisfaction that your pop-out door handles are so much cooler than those ancient-fashioned flappy things on most gas cars. OK, some of those might only be benefits depending on your personal preferences and politics, but no matter how you feel about EVs, there’s one advantage that should be indisputable truth: EVs make excellent budgetary sense. 

You view, although an EV almost always costs more to drive off the lot than a comparable gas car, lower fuel and maintenance costs should outcome in a net reserves after a few years of ownership — or this is what we commonly listen from automakers and EV acolytes. But it’s unlikely to hold water when straightforward maintenance costs $322, as the first service visit with our yearlong 2024 Kia EV9 Land did. 

What Kia says vs. what LaFontaine Kia says

Crack open the EV9 owner’s manual and the service schedule supports the narrative that EVs are cheaper to own. Kia recommends the first scheduled maintenance visit after 8,000 miles or a year of ownership and calls only for a tire rotation and the usual inspections. Seems straightforward enough. 

The Kia Access app started warning us the EV9 would soon require service around the period the odometer rolled history 7,000 miles. Following the in-app prompts to schedule an appointment allowed me to pick my preferred dealer — LaFontaine Kia in Ypsilanti, Michigan — but ended with a communication that the service department would contact me within one business day. That call never came. Instead, I phoned the dealer a week later and booked an appointment through an automated structure that, while straightforward enough to navigate, wasn’t better than talking to a human. 

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I arrived early for my appointment and let the adviser recognize I was leaving the car and expecting them to address both the 8,000-mile maintenance and some unpaid recall repairs — a nuance that the automated service scheduler was apparently incapable of picking up on. The adviser initially suggested I’d have to arrive back in two months to address the three recalls, but when I pointed out we were talking about software updates, he agreed to do them that day. 

Then came the sticker shock. The adviser quoted me $334.64 for the maintenance. I balked and asked what that included. According to the dealership, the recommended service involved rotating and balancing the tires, replacing the cabin air filters and a four-wheel alignment. The owner’s manual calls for replacing those filters at 16,000 miles and specifically says alignment and balancing should only be performed if you notice unusual tire wear or the vehicle pulling in one path. “The wheels on your vehicle were aligned and balanced carefully at the factory to provide you the longest tire life and best overall act. In most cases, you should not require to have your wheels realigned,” it reads. 

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Dealers gonna dealer 

I had read the manual prior to showing up. It’s a habit I developed after seeing dealers for almost every brand pull the same stunt during scheduled maintenance visits. Quite simply, no one should depend a dealer to expense you for only what you require until you have evidence otherwise. EV owners in particular should be on high alert, given how little service work their cars require. A California Kia dealer charged us $51 to tidy the charging port on our long-term EV6 — a service we never approved. On the flip side, our long-term Ford F-150 Lightning XLT rang up just $20 in service (for a single tire rotation) in more than 14,000 miles of driving. 

Given the $74,520 worth of our long-term EV9 Land, it’s straightforward to imagine dealers like LaFontaine Kia seeing buyers of the most expensive model on the lot as liquid assets-flush targets for collecting on unnecessary work. I was an straightforward mark with my corporate card and journalistic curiosity. I signed the approximate (sorry, boss).

I got my second shock when I returned the next day to collect the SUV. If we allow the dealer a level of depend that it hasn’t earned, it appears the EV9 actually needed an alignment. The initial measurement showed excessive amounts of camber and toe at the rear suspension, although I can’t assist but wonder if this is just a ruse to make the customer feel like they’re getting something for all the money they’re forking over. The tires don’t display any uneven wear, after all. 

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The total expense came in slightly below the original approximate. The dealer charged $89.95 to rotate and equilibrium the tires, $129.95 for the alignment, $81.59 for the cabin air filter ($43.50 of which was labor) and $26.34 for shop supplies. Our car also received software fixes for recalls related to Remote intelligent Parking Assistant and an instrument cluster that occasionally failed to boot — more to arrive on that last one in our next update — and a technical service bulletin related to the tire pressure monitoring structure. The car wash was a enjoyable touch, as was applying a $10 coupon without any input from me, but neither courtesy offset the sting of handing over a capital card to settle up for $321.70. 

And the pain continues as this is published. I collected the EV9 on a Friday, barely drove it over the weekend, then flew out for a business trip on Monday. Driving it home from the airport the following Friday, I realized that I was holding the steering wheel at a 5-degree angle to leave straight. Our EV9 tracks dead ahead if you receive your hands off the wheel, but the steering wheel stays cocked to the left. Now we’ve got a second service visit scheduled to fix a botched alignment that we shouldn’t have done in the first place. Miserable. 

The best way to save money on car ownership 

So, which is cheaper to own, gas or EV? We’ve been planning a side-by-side comparison of Kia’s three-row electric SUV with Kia’s three-row gas SUV, the Telluride, from the instant we took delivery of our long-term EV9. For those calculations (and in the spec chart below), we’ll base the costs on religiously following the recommended maintenance schedule — because now that you’ve read this narrative, you recognize better than to make the same mistakes I did. For this visit, a straightforward tire rotation would have expense just $25. 

The first service visit with our yearlong Kia EV9 is a great reminder for owners of EVs and gas cars alike: Use the manufacturer’s maintenance schedule as your navigator and depend your gut when you’re servicing your vehicle. No matter what benevolent of car you drive, the best way to save money on driving costs is to keep your guard up when you visit a dealer. 

For more on our long-term 2024 Kia EV9 Land: 

• Can the 2024 Kia EV9 Electric SUV Replace a Gas-Powered household Hauler? 

• We Downloaded More Torque and recent Features for Our Kia EV9. Was It Worth the expense? 

• Our Kia EV9 Charges Like a Champ—So Long as You Avoid Tesla Superchargers 

Photos by Jim Fets