Why is that Kia’s light blinking? Inside the new EV’s bold headlight design

Stare at the front of a new Kia EV9, and you’ll notice a variety of lights shining back at you. At the edges of the vehicle’s snout are its look-at-me, zig-zagging daytime running lights; moving inward, the electric vehicle’s headlights, each made up of a dozen squares, are there to bathe the road ahead in light when it’s dark out.

But on some trim levels, where the grille would typically be on the three-row electric SUV, a matrix of customizable lights animates with different patterns when you approach the vehicle. 

Kia calls these glowing animations “welcome lights,” and they were born from an opportunity that came with building an EV, says Kurt Kahl, the chief designer at Kia Design Center America. “It’s an electric vehicle—we don’t need a traditional grille and all that cooling,” he says. (For a point of comparison, check out the grille on the Kia Telluride, a vehicle with an internal combustion engine under the hood.) “We had this bit of a blank slate to come up with something new for EV9 for the face, and to have something very memorable and recognizable.”

The EV9’s two highest trim levels, called Land and GT-Line, are the only versions of the vehicle that offer the animated welcome lights. Approach a GT-Line vehicle, for example, and you’ll see a pattern that Kia calls “Focused” play out on part of the front grille area; that one pattern comes with the car, gratis. But owners of vehicles with either of those two trim levels who want to shell out an additional $250 will get five extra lighting options in addition to the one the car came with. 

One of the optional patterns called “Solid” begins with the LEDs on the vehicle’s front forming what look like two arrows, pointing toward one another, followed by a line of light that moves from the top to the bottom, and concluding with a line of three vertical columns, each smaller than the next. You can see the five different optional patterns, which have names like “Active,” “Technical,” and “Elegant” here. 

The lighting patterns are a bit like a wave between driver and car. Kahl says that the animation is “almost like your vehicle is acknowledging you—it’s just this kind of interesting interaction you can have with the vehicle as you’re approaching.” It’s a playful, first-of-a-kind feature for Kia.

But there’s more going on with the vehicle’s front end. The daytime running lights form something of an L shape, and Kahl says that those lights embody a design language that Kia calls “Star Map.” Picture the way you might draw a star constellation, with the stars as heavier points of light and thinner lines connecting them; the daytime running lights evoke that design, says Kahl. (You’ll see similar lighting on the Kia Seltos, which launched in 2020 and kicked off the Star Map design.) And because the daytime running lights make a type of L shape, some of the animated start-up welcome lights also form L shapes, too. 

Kia isn’t the only automaker using lighting to build a sense of brand identity—a way to telegraph the vehicle’s design in the dark. For example, consider Rivian’s headlights, which are in the shape of a stadium seen from above. And then there’s the wild moving headlights on the Volvo EX90 and the company’s signature “Thor’s Hammer” design. 

The EV9’s blinking display is the result of a clever design that involves 84 LEDs blinking behind a painted acrylic casing that has been laser etched with a static pattern that’s not noticeable to the eye. Kahl describes the etched pattern as “very small windows” where the LEDs can shine through and create the animated patterns.

Robby Degraff, who focuses on product and consumer insights analysis at AutoPacific, a firm that conducts automotive market research and provides industry analysis, thinks that what Kia is doing here is fun. But he warns that Kia needs to be cautious when tacking on an extra cost to customers. 

The EV9 models that support the welcome lights begin at around $70,000, which can make a superfluous add-on a little hard to stomach. “One thing that we’ve found in our research is that EV shoppers in general are very, very, very, very, very price-conscious. Kia has a great idea with these adjustable, customizable lightings, but I think they really need to be careful about how much they charge for it,” Degraff says, noting that $250 is “a lot of money just to change some lighting.” That feeling is also illuminated on Reddit, where one poster called the price “insane” and others added that it should just come free to people who buy a GT-Line vehicle. (Kia says that the one-time purchase stays with the vehicle for its life, staying activated even if you sell it.) 

“I love the idea of it,” Degraff adds. “I think it’s super cool, it’s very future-focused, it’s unique, but I just think that it might be a tough sell for people.”