Car pool|All-electric cars of the Audi e-tron model have been invited for inspection. Charging batteries is recommended to be limited at least for the rest of the year, until a software update is available.
in Finland about 30 Audi electric cars have been called for inspection this year due to a possible fire hazard. You can drive the cars in question, but the importer recommends that their batteries be charged to a maximum of 80 percent for the time being.
Audi’s importer K-Auto sent car owners a customer letter in July, inviting cars to have their high-voltage battery checked and software updated. STT has seen the invitation in question.
The letter stated that the car batteries may have had defective cell modules, which, together with the battery’s high state of charge, could have caused the battery to overheat and cause a fire hazard.
“This could result in a fire hazard that poses a risk of serious or life-threatening injury to people inside or outside the car, as well as a risk of serious property damage,” the letter said.
The letter also referred to the first letter sent earlier this year, in which car owners were told about the recall campaign.
The letter also said that if the owner has recently sold his car, he should report the new owner’s details to the nearest Audi service center.
In the letter the importer recommends that the recalled cars’ batteries should not be fully charged even after the inspection and software update.
This is because the software update to be installed in the cars is only the first part of the update. According to the customer letter, the final version of the software will probably be available in January–March next year.
In its letter, K-Auto instructs that the battery charge should be limited to 80 percent until the final software version can be installed.
In the letter, this is justified by the fact that the batteries would not be overloaded before the final software update. For this reason, an instruction sticker is attached to the cars, reminding the car user to limit the charging of the battery.
K-Auto tells STT that the charge level limitation is a precaution.
“It is clear that cars would not be used in road traffic if they were dangerous in terms of this (possible battery failure)”, marketing and communications director Aarne Töllinen About K-Auto.
Töllenen according to all about 30 cars have already been checked and any defective parts of the batteries have been replaced. He says that one or more battery modules had to be replaced in two cars.
In addition, an update to the battery monitoring software was installed on all recalled cars.
With the update, the software is supposed to identify possible deviations in the batteries of these cars. The update in question is therefore not coming to other Audi electric cars.
“All electric cars have software that monitors the operation of the battery. The update for these recalled cars is a new version of this already existing software,” explains Töllinen.
The recall concerned a batch of approximately 30 Audi e-tron fully electric cars. According to Töllinen, the number corresponds to about one percent of all Audi e-tron models registered in Finland. According to him, the importer is not aware that the cars in question have caught fire in Finland due to a possible battery failure.
Töllinen says that the cars would have been outright banned if they were dangerous in road traffic or for their users.
“Of course, there has not (been) any danger in the batteries that would endanger the use of the car. If there were such risks, the actions would be very different,” he says.
E-tron model the battery problem has not only affected Finland. According to Töllinen, Audi announced the matter internationally at the beginning of the current year.
For example, a Canadian automotive publication Car Guide reported in January that Audi had recalled nearly 30,000 of its 2019-2022 e-tron models in North America. About 2,000 of the recalls concerned Canada.
Car Guide reported that even then, car owners were advised to limit the charge level of batteries to 80 percent to reduce the risk of fire.
The news reported that the possibly defective batteries had been manufactured by the South Korean company LG Energy Solution.
According to the release, earlier in the 2020s, the same manufacturer has been linked to several fires and extensive recalls involving Chevrolet Bolt EV -model and Hyundai Kona Electric -model cars.
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