Used Kona Electric vs Niro EV: Check the Recall First

If you are looking at a used Hyundai Kona Electric or a used Kia e-Niro, the car in front of you may be under a fire-risk battery recall right now. There is a good chance nobody has mentioned it. The seller is probably not hiding anything. In most of Europe the official tools are so badly built that you can look a car up, read the words "no recalls", and still be wrong.

Both got one in 2026. Hyundai recalled every first-generation Kona Electric it ever built. Kia recalled e-Niros made between May 2020 and March 2022. A recall like this does not make either car a bad buy. It does mean you want to know whether the work has been done on the exact car you are looking at.

Table of contents

• The short version
• Two recalls, one after the other
• Which cars are affected
• How to check a car, country by country
• Software, or a new battery?
• What else is different
• Questions people ask
• Sources

The short version

Two recalls, one after the other

Hyundai's recall is called 61D004. It covers the first Kona Electric, the shape sold from 2018 to 2023. It covers that whole generation by build date, and Hyundai puts the number of affected cars at 104,011 worldwide, 25,056 of them in the UK and 6,891 in the Netherlands.

It did not start everywhere on the same day. The Dutch published it on 26 February 2026. The EU alert came on 26 March. France listed it on 3 April. Britain followed on 4 May.

Regulators do not agree on what is actually wrong, and the difference matters to you as a buyer. The EU alert blames the software. It says the battery monitoring software cannot spot the battery overheating in time. The British regulator describes something physical instead: the cells inside the battery can drift apart in voltage, and that can cause a short circuit. The Dutch record says the same as the British one.

Those are two different cars to buy. One has a bug that a dealer can patch. The other has cells that are already drifting. The official record supports both readings, so we are telling you both.

Kia's recall is called 261261. The Dutch regulator files the same recall under a different number, 261216, which is not a great start. It covers e-Niros made between 19 May 2020 and 18 March 2022. That is 14,118 cars worldwide, 1,932 of them in the Netherlands. Kia says the software does not always notice tiny short circuits between cells, and those cells can then overheat and catch fire while the car is parked or charging. The recall opened in July 2026.

One warning about those two numbers. Hyundai's recall covers 104,011 cars and Kia's covers 14,118. That gap is not a safety score. Hyundai built far more of these cars and drew its net far wider, over five and a half years of production against Kia's under two. It tells you nothing about which car is more likely to catch fire.

Which cars are affected

Both cars changed shape in the middle of the years you are shopping in. That is where people get caught.

A 2023 Kona Electric could be either shape. The old one stopped being made on 15 July 2023. The new one started that same summer. Only the old one is recalled. You can tell them apart two ways. Check the battery: 39.2 or 64 kWh means the old car. Or measure it: the old one is 4,205 mm long, or 4,180 mm if it was made before the facelift in November 2020. The new one is 4,355 mm.

A 2018 or 2019 e-Niro is not in Kia's recall. It starts at cars made on 19 May 2020. Hyundai's recall works the other way round and covers the whole generation.

One caveat on the Kia. The EU alert just says "Niro EV" and does not name the body code, while the Hyundai alert names its code outright. We read the dates and concluded this is the first generation only. The regulator never actually said so.

The two cars share their motor and battery but not their underpinnings. Same battery sizes, same 100 kW and 150 kW motors, same 395 Nm, same fast-charging speeds of 44 kW and 77 kW. Underneath, the e-Niro uses a Kia platform it shares with the Hyundai Ioniq, while the Kona Electric is the petrol Kona with an electric motor in it. Neither car uses Hyundai's newer E-GMP platform, so the charging-unit failures you may have read about belong to the Ioniq 5, Ioniq 6, EV6 and EV9, not to these two.

How to check a car, country by country

United Kingdom. The government checker asks you to type the model name, and it has to match exactly. Capital letters count.

Type KONA ELECTRIC, which is the name written on the back of the car, and you get "This vehicle has no recalls". That name does not exist in the database at all. Type KONA OS EV and the 2026 recall appears. Type the same thing in lower case and it vanishes again. The Kia does the same: e-NIRO finds an older recall from 2023, E-NIRO finds nothing.

Now the part that should worry you. We made up a model name, ZZZNOTACAR, and typed that in. The site replied "This vehicle has no recalls", word for word what it says about a clean car. It never tells you that it did not recognise what you typed. The Kona alone is filed under nine different spellings.

There is a way round it. The government publishes the whole recall list as one downloadable file, linked from its own front page, and almost nobody uses it. You can search it without guessing spellings. It also shows columns the website hides, including the manufacturer's own reference number and the build dates. The Kona entry reads: started 4 May 2026, 25,056 cars, reference 61D004, built 24 January 2018 to 15 July 2023.

Easier still, Hyundai UK has its own checker that takes a number plate or a VIN, with no login. Kia UK has nothing like it. Its recall page tells you to check your number plate through the MOT service, which gets its recall data from the government list, which does not include Kia's 2026 recall. Follow Kia's own advice and you go in a circle. The 2026 Kia recall really is missing from the British list. Missing is not the same as excluded: Hyundai's recall took about six weeks to appear in Britain after the European alert.

Netherlands. The best tool in Europe, and Dutch buyers should use it. The RDW lets you type a number plate and see that car's recalls, free, no login. On 19 September 2026 it showed 3,779 Dutch Konas still waiting and 4,122 done. For the Kia it showed 1,568 waiting and 338 done, which looks bad until you notice Dutch owners were only written to on 10 August, six weeks earlier. Those Kona numbers add up to more cars than the 6,891 the RDW says the recall covers in the Netherlands, and it does not explain why.

Two things it will not tell you. "Done" means the dealer reported the work finished, and nothing more. The file has four columns and no room to say what was actually fitted, so you cannot tell a software update from a new battery. And if a plate brings back nothing at all, that is not proof the car is fine. No record means no information.

Germany. Kia's Europe-wide checker works: type the 17-character VIN, no login. Hyundai Germany has no recall page at all. We read its whole site map, 256 pages, and there is nothing. German buyers have to take the VIN to a dealer.

Spain. Spain has something nobody else has. The DGT lets you check a car you do not own, which is exactly the car you care about. Their own words: with the chassis number or VIN you can find out whether a vehicle that is not yours has a recall waiting. The catch is that you have to prove who you are, with a digital certificate, DNIe or Cl@ve. In practice that means a Spanish ID, so if you are buying from abroad you cannot use it. On someone else's car it answers yes or no and nothing more. And once a recall has been carried out it stops showing, so a clean answer does not mean the car was never recalled.

France. The government site lists Hyundai's recall, published on 3 April 2026. Kia's 2026 recall is not there yet. "Yet" is the right word. Kia's 2025 battery recall did turn up on the same site, about eleven weeks after the European alert.

The two brands want different things from you. Hyundai France asks for a number plate, which you can often read off the advert before you drive anywhere. Kia France asks for a VIN, which usually means standing next to the car with the paperwork in your hand.

Italy. Kia Italy has an open VIN checker. Hyundai Italy has none, and we read its whole site map, 2,444 pages, to be sure. So the car with the much bigger recall is the one an Italian buyer cannot look up. Italy does keep an official recall register, but it comes out as a PDF twice a year and you cannot search it by VIN.

Ukraine. We could not find a working Ukrainian recall checker at all. There is another way in, and it only works here. A lot of used stock in Ukraine was imported from North America. Those cars have VINs that start KM8 or KND. You can check one free, straight away, on the American government site. Of the Kona adverts on AUTO.RIA that showed a VIN, 23 cars came from the US or Canada, 25 from Korea and 15 from the Czech plant. For the Niro it was 69 American against 111 others.

One thing nobody can tell you: whether the 2026 European recalls apply to a car first registered in America. No regulator has published an answer.

Software, or a new battery?

Worth knowing before a dealer tells you a car is "done".

Three regulators describe Hyundai's fix three different ways. The Dutch say every car gets new software, and if that software then finds something wrong, the dealer replaces the whole battery as a precaution. Australia says the dealer checks the battery and either updates the software or fixes the affected cells, which is not the same as a new battery. Britain says only that Hyundai is updating the software, and does not mention replacing anything.

All three agree the software comes first. A new battery is a possible second step in some countries. Nobody publishes how often it actually happens.

Hyundai's earlier recall, back in 2021, really was a battery replacement programme. Hyundai told the American regulator what had gone wrong: a tab inside cells from LG's Nanjing factory could fold over and short out. Cars built between 28 August 2018 and 2 March 2020 were affected, and those cars got a whole new battery. Britain and Canada recorded it the same way, though the American regulator's own summary says dealers should inspect first and replace only if needed.

So some early Kona Electrics on sale today are driving around with a battery years younger than the car. That is worth something, and less than you might hope. One German owner had his 2019 car's battery replaced under that recall. About two and a half years later he paid for an independent test. It came back at 94% of the original capacity, not the 100% he expected. He reckoned he had lost 50 to 80 km of range. Two French owners had theirs replaced free at 50,000 and 77,000 km and were still recommending the car in February 2026.

No public record tells you whether a particular car got a new battery or only new software. Ask the seller for the dealer's invoice or job sheet, and ask for it by recall number. If the paperwork is missing, what you have is a car you do not know about, not a car that got software.

What else is different

Once you have sorted out the recall, these two cars are closer than most comparisons pretend.

Neither one is more efficient. ADAC tested both cars in both generations, and owner logs on Spritmonitor cover hundreds of real cars. They do not point the same way.

A Spanish motorway test adds a fourth view and puts the Kia narrowly ahead, but it reads off the car's own computer and leaves charging losses out, so it is not in the table. Pick a winner here and you are really just picking which test you like. One more caveat: charging losses are inside the ADAC numbers, and of ADAC's own four test documents only the 2019 e-Niro one says how the car was plugged in. Our piece on WLTP against real range explains why published figures move around this much.

You cannot compare their reliability, because the data does not exist. Germany's TUV report for 2026 gives the Kona Electric a 4.8% serious-fault rate at two to three years old, which puts it sixth out of the 18 electric cars it covers. It has no Niro EV figure at all. ADAC's 2026 breakdown figures run a full set for the Kona: 13.9 breakdowns per 1,000 cars for 2018 models, falling to 6.1 for 2023 ones. Again, no Niro. Borrowing a "Kia Niro" number from somewhere else would be worse than saying nothing, because most Niros sold were hybrids and that number would be measuring them.

What the data does name is specific weak spots. On the Kona, the little 12 V battery, which ADAC flags for five years running, and brake discs that rust because the car hardly uses them. On the e-Niro, a whine from the gearbox bearing, which the Kona does not get.

The Kia is the bigger car. ADAC measured both boots the same way and got 280 litres for the e-Niro against 225 for the Kona. The makers quote 451 and 332, measured differently. Either way the Kia has more room and is 170 mm longer. It pays for that in range: 455 km on paper against the Kona's 484.

The Kia has the better warranty, which is the opposite of what most comparisons say. On the battery the two are close. Hyundai gives eight years everywhere we looked. Kia gives a separate eight years in Britain, but in Germany that eight-year battery cover only starts with 2026 cars, so every used one there has seven years and 150,000 km. Both promise to replace a battery that drops below 70% of its original capacity, though Hyundai only publishes that number in Britain.

The real gap is the warranty on the rest of the car. Kia gives seven years. Hyundai gives five. In Germany, Hyundai's sixth to eighth years are not a warranty at all but an insurance policy you pay for. Now look back at those weak spots. The 12 V battery, the brake discs and the gearbox whine are all covered by the warranty on the car, not the one on the battery. Buy a 2020 Kona today and it has no cover left. Buy a 2020 e-Niro and it is covered into 2027. Both warranties pass to you with the car, and both depend on the service history being complete.

Which one is easier to find depends where you live. In Germany, among cars first registered in 2022 or earlier, there are roughly eight used Konas for every Kia. In the Netherlands it flips: 493 Kias against 328 Konas. In Ukraine the Kia leads about three to one.

There is a pattern under those numbers. Where the Kia is easy to find, it has also been worked harder. Dutch e-Niros have done a median 86,000 km against the Kona's 75,000. Ukrainian ones have done 130,000 against 79,000. Put that next to Kia's seven years and 150,000 km and a lot of those cars are running out of time and mileage at once. Our guide to used EVs with known problems covers what else to look at on a high-mileage car, and you can put either of these against the alternatives with our comparison tool.

Questions people ask

Is it safe to drive a car that has not had the recall done?

The British regulator says you can use the car as normal, and park it somewhere with plenty of air until the software is updated. That is the only official advice we found, and it came from a regulator rather than from Hyundai.

Does the recall work cost me anything?

No. It is free, including a new battery if the car needs one. What it costs is time. A software update is a short appointment. Replacing a battery is not, and it depends on parts.

A dealer told me the car is clear. Is that enough?

It depends what they checked. Kia UK says its dealers cannot sell a car with an open recall and will sort it out first, which is real protection at a franchised dealer. A private seller may have typed a model name the database does not hold. Ask which website they used and what they typed into it.

Should the recall change what I pay?

Not on its own, because the work is free. Do ask whether it has been done, since booking it in takes your time. If the car has a replacement battery from Hyundai's 2021 recall, ask for the paperwork. Then treat it as a newer battery in an older car, not as a clean slate. Our guide to used EV battery health explains what to measure.

Sources

All figures checked on 19 September 2026.

EU Safety Gate. Alerts SR/00934/26 and SR/02118/26. https://ec.europa.eu/safety-gate-alerts/ RDW. Recalls MGP260064 and MGP260260. https://opendata.rdw.nl/ DVSA. Recall R/2026/128 and the full recalls file. https://www.check-vehicle-recalls.service.gov.uk/ NHTSA. Hyundai Part 573 report 21V-127, 1 March 2021. https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2021/RCLRPT-21V127-1095.PDF Vehicle Safety Recalls Australia. REC-006586. https://www.vehiclerecalls.gov.au/recalls/rec-006586 DGT. Llamadas a revision de un vehiculo. https://sede.dgt.gob.es/ RappelConso. Record 49426, 3 April 2026. https://rappel.conso.gouv.fr/ ADAC. Ecotest reports 09/2021, 12/2023, 10/2019 and 10/2022, and Pannenstatistik 2026. https://www.adac.de/ TUV-Verband. TUV Report 2026, 20 November 2025. https://www.tuev-verband.de/ Spritmonitor. Owner-logged consumption, Kona and Niro. https://www.spritmonitor.de/ Kia and Hyundai. Warranty terms, UK and Germany. https://www.kia.com/ and https://www.hyundai.com/