Hyundai Motor Company and LG Energy Solutions (formerly LG Chem) made a super strong push to replace the entire battery for’Kona Electric’, which suffered controversy over a series of fires.
On the 24th, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said, “Some of the high voltage batteries initially produced at LG Energy Solution’s Nanjing factory in China have been confirmed to have a fire due to poor manufacturing,” said He said he would enter.
The recall start date is March 29th of the following month. Recall targets: 25,083 Kona Electrics produced from May 11, 2018 to March 13, 2020, 1314 Ioniq Electrics produced from May 2019 to November 2019, November 16, 2017 to 3, 2020 A total of 26,699 units, including 302 units produced on the 11th of January
The Korea Transportation Safety Authority’s Automobile Safety Research Institute has conducted fire reproducibility tests along with detailed investigations of high-voltage batteries collected from recalls since October last year.
According to the results of the investigation, the video of the fire that occurred in the thermal runaway test inside the battery cell was similar to the video of the Kona Electric fire that occurred in Daegu last August. As a result of a detailed investigation of the defective high-voltage battery collected by the recall, it was confirmed that a fire could occur due to the folding of the negative tab.
However, regarding the’battery cell separator damage’, which is the cause disclosed by Hyundai Motor Company, a total of 369 charging and discharging was repeated, but it was found that no fire has occurred.
Previously, Hyundai Motor Company updated the battery management system and initiated a recall to replace the battery in the event of abnormalities in the battery, such as excessive voltage deviation or rapid temperature change between battery cells.
However, in January of this year, a fire broke out again at Kona Electric, which had been recalled in Daegu, and controversy arose whether the recall would be effective in preventing fires. Moreover, some of the recalled vehicles suffered from the so-called’brick phenomenon’, which made it impossible to operate the vehicle, causing some car owners to experience inconvenience.
Meanwhile, according to industry sources, Hyundai Motor Company and LG Energy Solutions are known to have decided to replace batteries for all Kona Electric’s global sales and are negotiating a share. The cost is said to be up to 1.5 trillion won.
On the 23rd, Hyundai Motor Company’s President Jae-Hoon Jang said, “I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by the fire issue: I think (measures) will be announced sooner or later.”