2022 Kia Niro Ev

After putting the car in park on a moderate slope, I exited the car and about 2 seconds later, as I was connecting the charger, the car rolled backward 4 feet before coming to a stop. I immediately confirmed that the car was in park. The parking brake was *not* on. (Or at least, I did not manually set it- I don't know if this car activates the brake automatically when in park.) The right front wheel was on ice. All other wheels on bare gravel. The temperature was 36 deg F. This is an EV, so it may have some sort of event recorder built in. If so, look at roughly 9:10 EST on 2/10/22. This is a short-term rental from Enterprise, so I'll set the parking brake manually for the remainder of the rental and report it to them on return. Contact them if you want to inspect it. The registration lists the owner as "EAN Holdings LLC"

This complaint is about a vehicle design and implementation issue rather than a malfunction. The implementation of the low speed warning alert for this vehicle is dangerous to pedestrians. Several times, as I was backing out of a parking spot pedestrians have stopped directly behind the moving vehicle and could have been hit. When put into reverse this vehicle emits beeping tone from a speaker mounted in the FRONT bumper of the vehicle. Because the backup alert tone is emitted from the front bumper of the vehicle, the sound is reflected off other cars and structures and is perceived as completely non-directional to anyone standing behind the car. When people hear the beeping, they tend to stop and look around for the source of the sound, which is some cases seems to be coming from 1 or 2 aisles over in the parking lot, or from another direction altogether. The tone that the car emits is also inconsistent with the usual and expected 1000Hz tone that most people associate with backup beepers, causing further confusion to pedestrians. As implemented, the backup alert system on this vehicle does more harm than good and has the potential to cause a pedestrian accident because of the confusing, non standard and non-directionality of the sound. A blind or vision impaired person would have a very hard time discerning the direction that the sound is coming from and could get hit by this vehicle as it is backing up. To be effective, the backup beeper should be mounted in the rear of the car and emit the standard tone that people generally associate with backup alarms.