The list of benefits to driving an EV is long. There’s the effortless torque, the smooth power delivery, the calm highway experience, 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 old-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 fact: EVs make good financial sense. 

You see, although an EV almost always costs more to drive off the lot than a comparable gas car, lower fuel and maintenance costs should result in a net savings after a few years of ownership — or this is what we commonly hear from automakers and EV acolytes. But it’s unlikely to hold water when simple 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 simple enough. 

The Kia Access app started warning us the EV9 would soon need service around the time the odometer rolled past 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 message 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 system that, while easy 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 know I was leaving the car and expecting them to address both the 8,000-mile maintenance and some outstanding recall repairs — a nuance that the automated service scheduler was apparently incapable of picking up on. The adviser initially suggested I’d have to come 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 direction. “The wheels on your vehicle were aligned and balanced carefully at the factory to give you the longest tire life and best overall performance. In most cases, you should not need 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 trust a dealer to charge you for only what you need 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 clean 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 price of our long-term EV9 Land, it’s easy to imagine dealers like LaFontaine Kia seeing buyers of the most expensive model on the lot as cash-flush targets for collecting on unnecessary work. I was an easy mark with my corporate card and journalistic curiosity. I signed the estimate (sorry, boss).

I got my second surprise when I returned the next day to collect the SUV. If we allow the dealer a level of trust 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 help 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 show any uneven wear, after all. 

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The total cost came in slightly below the original estimate. The dealer charged $89.95 to rotate and balance 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 Smart Parking Assistant and an instrument cluster that occasionally failed to boot — more to come on that last one in our next update — and a technical service bulletin related to the tire pressure monitoring system. The car wash was a nice touch, as was applying a $10 coupon without any input from me, but neither courtesy offset the sting of handing over a credit 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 go straight. Our EV9 tracks dead ahead if you take 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 moment 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 story, you know better than to make the same mistakes I did. For this visit, a simple tire rotation would have cost 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 guide and trust your gut when you’re servicing your vehicle. No matter what kind 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 Family Hauler? 

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

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

Photos by Jim Fets