Hyundai nails down the issue with the Ioniq 5 battery discharging on its own

Some Hyundai Ioniq 5 owners have been complaining for a while now that the 12V auxiliary battery packs installed in their electric cars run out of current with no apparent reason. It has now turned out that the culprit was a software issue known as the wakelock.

The affected battery unit resides under the hood at the front end and provides power to the on-board electronic systems, displays, windows, door locks, and so on. It does not power the electric motors, however, reports suggest that it may occasionally run so low on power that the car would be unable to initialize its electronics and start up.

Fortunately for these affected owners, Hyundai has now identified the issue and proposed a solution, an Ioniq 5 owner known as The Ioniq Guy on YouTube reports. In his video, he says the manufacturer contacted him and explained the situation.

Apparently, the car ships with third-party Bluelink software that continuously requests data from the Ioniq 5. Whenever polled, the on-board system has to ‘wake up’ to process the request, no matter how small. Certain examples were found to receive up to 5,000 such polls per day, draining the battery extremely fast.

Hyundai has already issued a temporary software fix that caps the frequency of such events at just 20 per day. If it proves effective, it will be implemented on a permanent basis.