Well, unfortunately, I already voted when my car was brand new. If you review my other posts on this forum, you'll see that I've gone from an extremely delighted owner to a seriously disappointed
former owner in a relatively short time. I've put my money where my mouth is - after 5 months and 7,500 miles, I've
TRADED in my Genny at a loss of more than $14K.
Given that fully
12 of the issues driving me up a wall after 5 months with the car could be classified as "intermittent" (i.e., I could not drive into the dealership and demonstrate them on command), I had given the dealer permission to drive the car as necessary in order to experience them. This was the 1 part of my detailed 2-page computer-generated request list that the dealer did seem to fully comprehend and comply with, as I got my car back with an additional
412 miles on it - accompanied by a repair order noting "unable to verify" in
each and
every case. Trying to keep my cool, I had the service writer accompany me to the car when I picked it up, and on start-up
immediately replicated
2 of these "unverifyable" issues to her embarassed acknowledgement. On the way home from the dealership and over the next 2 hours of driving time, (which totalled around 45 miles), an additional
7 of the intermittents were experienced by my wife and I, some of them 3 or more times.
Many of the issues I was experiencing with the car have been noted in this forum - poor ride,
wiper blades which not only deteriorated prematurely but left huge chunks of rubber embedded in the windshield, seat memory and steering
wheel convenience feature issues, DIS problems, AFLS and TPS system lights which mysteriously cycled on and off - are probably classified best as "nuisance" issues which, although extremely annoying in a new car, do not impact vehicle safety or reliability. For this reason, I won't go into those details as you've already seen them here.
However, some of the things I was experiencing were directly safety and/or reliability related, and the fact that the dealer refused to even acknowledge them left me in a "no win" position. I wish to go on record here with a few of these safety issues so that anyone else who experiences them has something to point to by way of acknowledgment.
- First and foremost, my V8 would intermittently bog down severely on demand for hard acceleration - truly frightening. I live at the base of a blind hill on a rural highway, and one reason I prefer a V8 is that upon exiting my driveway I cannot see oncoming traffic more than 700 feet up the road. There is nothing worse than pulling from a standing stop onto a 55 MPH thoroughfare and suddenly seeing a tractor-trailor barrelling over the hillcrest in your rearview. Combine this with a completely non-responsive throttle and you have the perfect recipe for spontaneous bowel movement. This occurance (the hesitation, not the spontaneous bowel-movement) manifested under multiple conditions - cold start, warm restart, fully warmed engine; straight-line acceleration, acceleration while turning, premium fuel, regular fuel - no pattern, and believe me, I looked for one. I dont think it was overly aggressive traction control as I monitored the instruments for an indicator light and am also pretty familiar with what TC intervention feels like. With this one, I was in fear for my life.
- Possibly related, but yet different, was an alternating surge under hard acceleration - although the car would respond to throttle input in a timely manner and make power, it would not do so consistently - you could feel the car intermittently hold back and surge forward as it gathered speed. This seemed more prevalent on regular fuel than premium, but was still present intermittently and to varying degrees with either fuel type.
- Thirdly, the car would lose ALL electrical power - sometimes while sitting all by itself, sometimes right after I entered it and pushed the "Start" button. Occasionally, I would try to open a door or the trunk and the car would simply not open - no response using the Smart Key in proximity mode or when pushing the buttons on the fob. I would have to use the manual key to unlock the car and get inside. Even more often, I would enter the car normally, hit the "Start" button and it would simply die - total loss of electrical power right before my eyes - no start, no door locks, no instrument panel illumination, no horn. Sometimes I'd open and close the door and things would start working again, sometimes I had to get out and stick the manual key in the door lock to bring it back to life. In all cases, the clock would reset to 1:00 (this is how I knew it was happeneing even when I did not directly experience the problem), the trip computer would reset - but radio presets, seat memory and other items would remain in place. After this type of incident, the engine would run normally and transmission would shift fine - not like they were re-learning a running strategy after a typical battery disconnect. This power loss scenario started happening at about 2,000 miles and occured at least 100 times in 7,500 miles - to the point where it was happening once or twice a day over my last 30 days with the car.
These were the issues that had me concerened for my safety.
Here are a few more that I was experiencing, again more of a nuisance than a safety issue, but ones I nonetheless had to deal with and have not seen mentioned as frequently in the forum as the others I referred to above:
- Both mirrors dipped in reverse no matter where I put the mirror selector switch. What is supposed to happen is that both dip when switch is in left position, only right dips when switch is in right position, neither dip when selector switch is in middle position. This is the way it worked on delivery; after about 2,000 miles it changed on it's own and did so each and every time reverse was selected. In spite of my detailed description and photocopy of the QuickGuide page describing the proper function, the dealership technician was "unable to verify" the complaint - tht is, until I brought the service writer out to the car when I picked it up and showed her the problem 5 times in a row.
- The rear sunshade would activate on its own every couple of hours of driving.
- About 3 times a week, cellphone calls would come thru the audio system and I could pick up the call and the party on the other side could hear me, but I could not hear them. Next call, the system would work fine.
- About twice a month, the XM radio would forget all of it's station programming and would allow you to access only Channel 1. An hour later, you could access all 150 stations.
- Every 3rd or 4th day, the driver's side heated/cooled seat would shut itself off after about 5 minutes of operation and refuse to come back on. If you cycled the ignition key, it would work again - sometimes normally for another 2-3 days, sometimes for another 5 minutes before shutting down.
- Once a month or so, usually on a longer trip, car would drop out of Cruise Control every 5 minutes. After a while, Cruise would not work at all. Then it would operate flwlessly for a week.
- On 6 or 7 occasions, the driver's side seat (in addition to the other problems referenced above) moved to a full-forward, full-tilt position position as I started the car, nearly pinning me to the steering
wheel and refusing to move back. Luckily, I was able to get out of the seat on each occasion before being pinned in the car, and had read a post here in which the user went around to the passenger side of the car, reached over the seat and used the seat position memory controls to return the seat back to a useable position.
To this litany, I'll also add a few attitudinal issues I experienced with the dealership service department:
- The high beam headlights were absolutely useless to me on the rural roads I frequently drive. I replaced the bulbs with expensive high-output types thinking the issue might be substandard factory illumination, but this only resulted in my realizing that they were pointed into the ground 4 feet in front of the bumper and had apparently never been checked for alignment on prep. I got a call from the dealership informing me that I'd have to PAY for the aiming service since I'd "modified" the car by replacing the bulbs. I pointed out to the service advisor that 1) the lamps were ALWAYS lousy, 2) replacing the bulb capsule has
nothing to do with the
alignment of the headlamp and the car is designed to allow bulb replacement without any change to the lamp aim, and 3) I specifically did not change the aim of the headlamps when upgrading the bulbs. She was inflexible about the charge and I said if necessary, I would pay it. I then indicated that I was expecting a satisfaction survery from Hyundai, and that I would be very dissatisfied in having to pay to correct a problem which the dealership had been paid to check on vehicle preperation. Shortly thereafter, she rang me back to say that she had gone to bat for me with the Service Manager and convinced him that I should not be charged for the work.
- I complained about the driver's side seat bottom cushion for two reasons: discoloration (the outer side of the Cashmere cover was showing significant discoloration) and premature wear (the bottom seat cover was already showing signs of pilling throughout the perforated section). I was told summarily that this was not a warranty issue. Although I agree that in the end Hyundai is not responsible for my choice to occasionally wear blue jeans, I also think that a "luxury" car should not be showing readily visible signs of seat wear after 5 months of use - to me, that constitutes a defect and not a use issue - it's not like I'm wearing sandpaper pants...
There is a major disconnect between manufacturers, car owners and the technicians entrusted with maintaining the automobiles and therefore most directly responsible for customer satisfaction. The issue is the "flat-rate" pay system by which the great majority of dealership technicians are compensated. If I go to a dealership and ask them to repair my front brakes, they can look in a "flat rate" time guide supplied by the vehicle manufacturer and see that it should take, for example, 1.6 hours to do it. That is the minimum the dealership will charge me in labor, 1.6 hours. The technician will get paid 1.6 hours to do the actual work. The incentive for the technician, however, is to do the work
FASTER, because if he/she completes the job in, say, 1 hour, he/she still gets
paid the 1.6. Therefore, the technicians "commission" comes from the ability to "do" 10 -12 hours worth of work in an 8-hour day.
This means that for any job that is in the flat-rate book, the technician is always looking, by the very nature of the pay system, for a short cut - and believe me, manufacturers (who reimburse warranty claims from this same "flat-rate" manual) are not especially generous in setting the time allowances in the first place - this is why many dealerships use the "flat-rate" manual as a starting point and add some whimsical markup on top of it.
Now, compound this problem with a customer who has an unusual electrical or intermittent problem of some kind. The Service Manager can't go to a flat rate manual and find the manufacturer-specified time for repairing an intermittent engine hesitation or diagnosing an electrical short in a wire harness. These kinds of repairs are compensated on an "Actual Time" basis, if, and only if, an actual problem is identified and repaired. This means that if some poor tech gets stuck trying to isolate your wind noise complaint, he may have to drive your car for 25 minutes to verify the problem, work for an hour to identify the cause, and then another hour to actually make a repair by bending the warped door frame of your car to match the gasket. So, if the stars align properly, he gets paid 2.5 hours for his 2.5 hours of work, In the meantime, the guy working next to him gets paid 4.8 hours by knocking out 3 brake jobs in the same amount of time. Where is the incentive for the technician to isolate and repair the problem that is making you, the vehicle owner, unhappy?
It's not the survey. The survey affects the Service Manager's pay, the Service Advisor's pay, and in some cases the manufacturer's allocation of popular (and therefore profitable) cars to the dealership. That's why everybody chases
you, the vehicle owner, for a "perfect" score. A 9 out of 10 is not good enough - they need 10 out of 10 on every question. My service advisor begged me for a perfect score - she needs it to get paid, and, in my heart of hearts, I believe she did what she could to try to satisfy me. But she did not drive my car for 412 miles to verify the complaints, the technician did. She did not work on my car, the technician did. And, in the end, she has no power to repair my car, and neither do I. And I am left feeling
bad because I chose to be honest on my survey and report to Hyundai that they so screwed up that I dumped my car at a loss.
And that, my friends, is the most disappointing piece of this whole story. I didn't make a nuisance of myself-I simply took my lumps for a bad decision and a worse situation.
After deciding to get out of the Genesis at a significant monetary loss, I took the time to explain my experience clearly on the Hyundai service survey and expressed a willingness to take additional time to discuss the situation with anyone from Hyundai who was interested enough to talk about it. It doesnt seem like anybody is listening. Most of you seem like genuinely nice guys who are really enthusiastic about your automobiles. I hope you have better luck with them and the dealership/manufacturer network that supports them than I did.
