12v Battery Issue - Dealer's Catch 22

The local Hyundai dealer - Hanlee's in Richmond, CA - wants to keep my car so they can duplicate the problem of the 12v battery going dead before they will start trying to diagnose it.

It doesn't seem to faze them that the problem will likely take a month to recur.

I took my car in for the recall, hoping they could also work on the battery issue. It's died overnight maybe half a dozen times since I got the car in January.

I gave them a BM2 graph of the 12v battery discharging, and then not running ABS+ for two days with the battery at 12.1v. The tech looked at the graph and asked to keep it. I had real hope that he could get with the Hyundai engineers and make some progress.

But the service advisor says the engineers won't open up a case until the tech can say that he duplicated the problem but doesn't know how to fix it.

I asked the service advisor what she would do if it were her car. She said she'd call Hyundai Customer Care and open up a case with them. But every time I've contacted Hyundai Customer (Don't) Care, I get a boilerplate response, and if I press them, they say to contact my dealer.

Any suggestions?

 

The first day the 12v died, as soon as Hyundai Roadside Service left I drove to Harbor Freight and bought one. I use it routinely.

That is a pathetic situation and a pitiful long term solution for a brand new $40,000 plus car. #HyundaiBetaTester.

Any suggestions for how to get Hyundai to act like a real company and fix the car?

 

Yeah, that's one of the possibilities I'm considering. For that I'd have to take it in for service two more times, organize a bunch of records, and make an application. But I might well go that route once I stop sequestering from the virus.

I would guess that Hyundai's response would be to have an engineer talk to the service department and fix the car. I don't understand why they won't just do that now.

For a number of years after the Chevrolet Volt came out, owners had direct access to a tech support 800 number. When my second Volt died and waited over a month for a part, I called GM to ask them to expedite the fix. Their response was to initiate a lemon law buyback without my even asking! And I was driving a rental loaner all the time that was happening; the Hyundai dealer isn't offering loaners.

 

Happy to post the graphs. But I'd like to keep this thread on tactics and strategies, so have posted the technical stuff in the technical thread.

 

Progress. The service advisor's advice was good.

Apparently if you call Hyundai Customer Care enough times, they look at the file and decide they're willing to actually try to fix the problem. Maybe they too know how many trips to the dealer equals a lemon law buyback.

So I now have a case number and a case advisor, and he's going to get authorization to swap out the 12v battery - not because I think it'll fix anything, but it's the one thing that can be done without leaving the car, the dealer has a month's wait for a loaner, and who knows - it might just work.

 

Progress report, if it can be called that. I feel like I'm in a Kafka novel.

My case advisor is trying to get authorization to swap out the 12v battery, so that when it doesn't fix the problem we can go to the next step.

In order to get a new battery, I have to go to the dealer so they can perform a load check on the old battery. It will show the battery is OK. Then my case advisor has to go to a factory tech and the regional manager, and get them to authorize a new battery anyway. He has gone through this before and says this should take no more than a day, and he will try to get me a loaner. (I don't want to drive a strange car during the pandemic, and the dealership doesn't have loaners anyway.)

This will be the third time they did a load check and said there was nothing wrong. The last time was 10 days ago. It's documented on the service order. Why can't they just look at the service order?

Because there wasn't a tech ticket open at the time. I have a case number, but they still have to open a tech ticket so the factory tech is involved. This is the factory tech that wouldn't talk to the dealer tech until I opened up a case and got a case advisor to ... well, this is where you came in, right?

 

Two reasons why not:

First, there's some evidence that the problem is more complex and replacing the 12v battery won't solve it. But going through this charade seems like the only way to get a Hyundai engineer to actually look at it hard enough to suggest real solutions.

Second, this will be my third trip to a service department for the same warranty problem. If they don't fix it in four visits, there will be a presumption that the vehicle is a lemon under California law and I can demand that Hyundai buy it back.

 

The dealer returned my car today, after keeping it for eight days. It took them one day to check out the car and request Hyundai to authorize the battery replacement and ship it to them.

It took Hyundai a week to get them the battery. Unimpressive. I could have done it all in 15 minutes parked in front of Pep Boys. (But I couldn't have done Service Campaign 199.)

The service advisor had said they were going to put in an AGM battery. I liked that because AGM will last longer if it keeps going dead.

What they actually put in was another flooded battery. The other service advisor (the one who knows what she's doing) said the Kona EV won't support AGM.

And the battery is a different style that doesn't take a cover for the negative terminal. I wonder if it's the right part. (See photo and comment on that here.)

Now I reattach my BM2 and wait to see if it goes dead again.