u/Daniel_KOT_V2

Just need to vent my frustration. Subscribed to multimedia Bluelink additional subscription to be able to use Hyundai HotSpot. While I was charged the full cost and subscription is active in Bluelink app, the actual service can't be activated in the car.

I have sent the error ticket to Bluelink customer service team and weekly chasing them on the progress with no luck. The response is reading like a template. "We forwarded your issue to our IT team to inspect", "The IT confirmed that service is active at you account, if you experience a problem, please send a photo". And it is like a dead loop, sent and resent photos numerous times with service not accessible.

Last time I asked to escalate this issue as a complaint and compensate for the subscription fee, as the service was not provided as stated in the package description.

The answer comes back as simple as it could be, please send your written complaint by post to the address in Germany, no email, no phone, just plain mail.

And no word about canceling or compensating the chargers for service not provided.

It's a sad surprise to see such ignorance from Hyundai. They charge you first and then not bother.

Any advice on how to resolve this is welcome. TY

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I pulled the trip logs covering 18–28 July 2026 — a road trip out, a quiet week at the other end, and the drive back — and the numbers told a much more interesting story than I expected.

Note: this is a snapshot, not the full trip. The trip is still ongoing, and the biggest leg is still ahead — the drive home from the Alps. So treat everything below as a mid-trip data point rather than the final picture. Once the whole journey is done, I'll pull the complete logs and publish a proper full-trip statistics post covering start to finish.

The headline numbers

Total distance covered: 2,691.1 km. Total time driving: 41h 39min, across 61 logged trips, at an average speed of around 65.5 km/h.

Worth clarifying how the energy numbers work, because it matters for what follows. "Energy used" (922.6 kWh) is the motor's gross draw — the total energy demanded for propulsion, with regen not yet subtracted. "Energy recovered" (283.0 kWh) is a separate figure: how much the car generated itself through regenerative braking and fed back into the battery. The difference between the two — 639.6 kWh — is what actually left the battery and needed replacing.

Flip that around and it's a genuinely nice way to look at the trip: of the 922.6 kWh the motor asked for, 283.0 kWh (about 31%) the car generated itself through braking and descents, and the remaining 639.6 kWh (about 69%) came from external charging — public chargers and the home wallbox. Nearly a third of the energy for this trip never touched a charging cable at all.

At an average price of €0.33 per kWh, the 639.6 kWh that actually needed paying for cost roughly €211. For comparison, if there had been no regen at all and I'd had to charge the full 922.6 kWh, the bill would have come to around €304 — meaning regen directly saved about €93 on this stretch alone.

It's also worth translating that into "batteries." The IONIQ 9's gross battery capacity is 110.3 kWh, with a real usable capacity of around 106–107 kWh depending on variant, since a small buffer is always held back to protect the pack. Our net draw from the battery over the trip was 639.6 kWh — divide that by the usable capacity and it works out to roughly 6 full 0–100% charge cycles' worth of energy passing through the battery over these 10 days, even though the actual charging sessions were shorter and more frequent than that implies.

Net efficiency over this stretch works out to around 4.19 km/kWh (≈239 Wh/km).

Even without looking at a map, the shape of the trip is obvious: two big travel days out, a week of short local hops, then two big days back.

18–19 July (outbound): 673.6 km and 648.9 km — the bulk of the motorway miles.

20–25 July (staying put): tiny local trips, 9.3–145.8 km a day.

26–27 July (return leg): 391.2 km and 591.6 km.

28 July: back to short local runs.

The discovery that actually surprised me: regen

I went in expecting regenerative braking to claw back "some" energy on a big SUV like this. What the log actually showed was more impressive than that.

Across the whole trip, 283.0 kWh came back through regen — nearly a third of everything the car used. But the standout moment was a single short trip on 24 July at 17:35: 13.0 km, and the car showed ‑0.70 kWh used against 2.94 kWh recovered. Net energy gained on a drive. That's presumably a long, well-judged downhill or a stretch of heavy braking where one-pedal driving did essentially all the work — but seeing a negative number in the "energy used" column for a 2.5-tonne-plus electric SUV genuinely made me do a double-take.

The best single-trip efficiency backs this up: a 17.5 km hop on 20 July that cost only 0.32 kWh net — about 54.7 km/kWh. Nothing exotic about that drive, just low speeds, gentle inputs, and the regen doing its job quietly in the background.

What makes that figure genuinely interesting, though, is the bigger picture behind it: almost a third of all the energy spent on propulsion, the car generated itself — from braking and descending, energy that in a normal combustion car would simply vanish as heat in the brake discs. An ICE car has no way to reuse that energy at all; it's gone the instant you brake. Here, it went straight back into the battery and directly extended the range, effectively cutting the charging bill by a third. That's arguably the single biggest structural advantage an EV has over a combustion car on a mixed trip like this: it's not just that the motor itself is more efficient — it's that energy normally wasted on every single stop is put to work extending the journey.

The other end of the scale

Motorway cruising tells the opposite story, and it's worth being honest about it. The longest single trip — 19 July, 345.6 km in 225 minutes at ~91.7 km/h average — used 75.14 kWh. And the single heaviest gross energy draw of the whole log was an 186.3 km trip on 18 July that pulled 141.32 kWh before any regen was subtracted, almost certainly sustained high-speed running.

So the range/efficiency story on this car has a very wide spread: mid-50s km/kWh pottering around town, versus something far closer to 2.4 km/kWh when it's held at motorway speeds for hours. That's not unusual for a big EV, but having the actual numbers from my own driving — rather than a manufacturer average — makes it much easier to plan a route and actually trust the range estimate.

How does this stack up against Hyundai's own numbers?

Hyundai's official WLTP figures for the IONIQ 9 quote consumption as low as 194 Wh/km (about 5.15 km/kWh) for the most efficient Long-Range RWD variant, with a WLTP range of up to 620 km from the 110.3 kWh battery. Other variants are officially rated closer to 3.01 mi/kWh (~206 Wh/km, ~4.85 km/kWh). Independent real-world testing (Parkers, on AWD models) has found something closer to 2.7 mi/kWh (~4.35 km/kWh, ~230 Wh/km) on a mixed test route.

My net figure over this stretch — 4.19 km/kWh (239 Wh/km) — lands just below that independent real-world benchmark and noticeably below the official WLTP number, which is exactly what you'd expect: WLTP is a lab cycle, and this trip skewed heavily towards sustained high-speed motorway running rather than a gentle mixed cycle. It's a good reminder that WLTP figures are a useful comparison tool between models, not a promise of what any individual trip will return — especially one bookended by two multi-hundred-kilometre motorway days.

What's more telling is the gross figure, before regen is credited back: 2.93 km/kWh (341 Wh/km). That's the number you'd see if the car couldn't recover any braking energy at all — and it shows just how much of the gap between "showroom number" and "real-world number" regen alone is clawing back on this kind of driving.

Takeaway

If you're deciding whether an EV this size makes sense for mixed motorway-and-local driving: it does, but go in with eyes open about the split. The local, low-speed days are dramatically cheap to run — practically free, some days. The motorway days are where you pay for the size and the speed. But the real takeaway from these ten days is that regen isn't a marketing footnote here — it put nearly a third of all the energy spent back into the battery, meaning a third of the charging bill was effectively paid for by the braking itself rather than the wall socket. That's exactly the energy a combustion car in the same trip would have simply burned off as heat with nothing to show for it — and it's why a mixed EV road trip ends up more efficient than it looks on paper.

Data pulled from the car's own trip log, 18–28 July 2026.