There is no such thing as the EV service interval

Finding a schedule is a different job at every manufacturer. Some print it on a public page. Some make you pick a model, or a year, or enter a VIN. Some bury it in a section of the owner’s manual. Some publish no schedule at all, on purpose, because the car raises each item when it is due.

• 4Plain web page
• 2Interactive selector
• 7Owner’s manual
• 1VIN required
• 5Car tells you

That variation is not a footnote to the intervals — for an owner trying to find out what their own car needs, it is most of the problem.

None of these visits include an oil change, spark plugs or a transmission service, because none of those parts exist. What is left is tires, brake fluid, cabin air filters, coolant and inspection.

That is worth knowing before a service desk quotes you a number. A scheduled EV visit is mostly someone looking at the car. Where one manufacturer asks for that every 8,000 km and another asks every 30,000, the difference is a decision about service revenue and liability as much as about the machine.

The one item that genuinely matters on a schedule is brake fluid, which absorbs moisture on a calendar rather than a distance — every three to five years across most of this table, and regenerative braking does not slow it down.

2 makes are marked unresolved. In none of these cases is the manufacturer hiding anything. It means a single headline interval cannot honestly be taken from what they publish — because the schedule is expressed per component, because the manufacturer’s own channels give different numbers, or because reading it at all requires a VIN we do not have.

Ford. The only make here whose Canadian schedule is genuinely gated. ford.ca asks for a VIN or an owner account before it will show one, so there is no figure to read without owning the car. An earlier version of this row printed 16,000 km taken from Ford’s US schedule, which was neither verified nor Canadian — exactly the kind of borrowed number the rest of this table exists to avoid.

Hyundai. Hyundai’s own channels disagree: Bluelink reports a first service at 6,000 km, the Canadian VIN lookup says 12,000 km, and the owner’s manual says 24,000 km. Hyundai Canada separately tells Canadian owners to follow the severe-usage schedule, which changes the answer again. Ask a dealer which applies to your VIN, in writing.

An invented figure would have been worse than a blank. Kia sat here until recently for what turned out to be a unit error: the “every 8,000 km” repeated across owner forums is Kia’s own line, “Rotate every 13,000 km (8,000 miles)”, with the unit dropped. Kia now has its real interval. A guess would have entrenched the wrong one.

This is the question underneath the complaint, and the answer is not in a maintenance schedule. It is in the warranty booklet — a different document per make, written as legal text.

The short version: no booklet we have read says a missed service cancels coverage. They say something narrower and harder to argue with, that they will not pay for damage the missed service caused. One make goes further and makes an annual battery check an outright condition. We read the Canadian booklets and quoted them on a page of their own: what an EV warranty in Canada actually covers, including the capacity floor each manufacturer guarantees and which makes offer free arbitration when they say no.