Frustration with Service Center after recall update

I would defer to the owner's manual which does not preclude you from either of those situations. Since you've had the update any temporary advice regarding those items is no longer applicable. Just as dealer's service managers are not rocket scientists and able to analyse the technology on demand, they are not lawyers either.

 

We have not had this most recent recall 196 done yet. What do they do? How long will they have the car. Last BMS update (recall) took 1 week and had to drive a ICE loaner car. Are they replacing the High voltage batteries, or what?

 

I had my Recall 960 done at Lakeland Hyundai and it took a couple of hours.. Recall 196 was also done here at Lakeland Hyundai.. They finished the first updates within 2 hours but the last update kept failing. They had the car for 24 hours before I got it back.. It's a software update and if the car fails a test as part of the update, they will need to get you a new battery.. My car passed without issues .

 

Thx, will have to schedule with our dealer. I was worried they don't really know what they are doing.

 

Hmm, I remain unconvinced that they do. I am still in wait and see mode.

 

If you bring it to Lakeland Hyundai, they have actually done mine before, so it would not be their first Kona Electric 196 update.. I'm sure that your dealer can get it done but the first one may always be a challenge.. I understand that Lakeland Hyundai is probably over an hour from where you are..

 

I'm with KiwiME on this one.
Remember the Dealers are independent businesses, not usually part of Hyundai. They must defer to Hyundai on these sensitive legal items. Try talking to the business owner: they are the ones with all the risk. Service managers are just employees normally. And the advice to park or not park where came from Hyundai, so they may or may not have advice on an updated vehicle.

BTW, I had my update 2 days ago - went without a hitch. As always, Springfield Hyundai have been first class.
I sorta felt my car had a bit of extra "pep" in it; imagination?

 

In all fairness to Clamps he was instructed by Hyundai/NHTSA that his car was recalled as a potential fire hazard and what the remediation process may be and very little information after that. I think the question is legitimate as its unclear that Hyundai fully understands the full nature of the problem. I think its legitimate for your servicing dealer as an accepted agent of Hyundai to provide some degree of supporting information in this regard. I mean honestly your service advisor has no problem about giving you service related safety opinions when it suits their income stream. Sadly the reluctance to provide an answer to Clamps question implies that they don't have enough data to confidently state that this recall remediation will prevent battery fires.

 

My update was Nov. 4, they told me it would be 1 hour it took 4, the reason being it was the first update they performed and they had a learning curve. The invoice basically states the update for recall 196 was performed. That's it. To be honest, I'm not confident they even did it, since all of my settings remained unchanged. Like you, when I asked if it was safe now, they weren't definitive, as if they were cautiously tiptoeing around legal ramifications.

I've posted several times now that dealer sales and service departments are for the most part woefully lacking in EV knowledge and experience, nor do they have incentive to learn, since there's no profit in it for them. Frankly I wouldn't trust them to put it on a lift properly for a tire rotation. When I picked the car up new 13 months ago, it had 60 miles in the tank, the salesman telling me their charger wasn't working. They couldn't even have plugged the level 1 into a standard wall outlet? Maybe they didn't know how.

Anyway having said all that, I'm confident that as EV's gain popularity and competitiveness, which they will, the dealerships will have to adjust and get up to speed, however grudgingly. It may not be obvious yet, but the days of fossil cars are numbered.

 

From the TSB with my underlining:

In the context of what you normally do with any car, asking if it's safe to park in the garage is a perfectly reasonable question. But the context of an EV that has just had a repair to reduce the risk of spontaneous combustion, their reluctance to say it's "safe" is understandable because the implication is that it's in absolute terms. They've only seen the same TSB we've seen and are likely no more enlightened about this problem than we are.

 

Yes indeed. All good points above, including Apu.
I wasn't excusing, just explaining.
As I have noted before, the dealer biz model is not going to work with EVs - no money in the servicing.
When I asked the same questions as Jimct & Clamps, I got a completely up-front response: "sorry, we just don't know"; "Hyundai haven't told us"
Since we have seen in the last couple of days the same issue in Chevy Bolts, it might be LG Chem need to step up now.
(and as an aside, some my settings did change with the upgrade)

 

I think some common sense has to play here. Given the legal situation in the US, you can't expect them to say absolutely that it would be safe to park in your garage. But that doesn't mean then that they should say it is unsafe to park in your garage. Given the newness of EV batteries (as compared to gasoline in ICE cars), I think the same situation would apply to any EV manufacturer, whether or not they ever had a fire. And remember Tesla was having fires long before the Kona even became available for sale.

Having said that, I do think it is fair and reasonable to ask and learn as much as you can about the circumstances and potential risks, just as you have done. Blind faith with such serious consequences is not wise either. But in the end, we have to make our own assessments and what we are comfortable with. If you really don't trust your car, then maybe sell it, and go back to an ICE vehicle.

Life is full of risks. Doesn't mean we should all hole up in our homes and not go out anywhere. In business, at my job we had to make some pretty important risk assessments with some decisions. This equation was always a good guide. Degree of risk = cost X frequency (incl a probability estimate). In this case, the probability of it happening to you is very, very small, and the cost is not very high (you do have insurance, right?). So for me it is actually very much a no brainer. Hopefully, it should not be too difficult to decide how big this risk is for you either.

 

Well, I tried to give you some advice to decide for yourself (the equation) if it is safe or not to park in the garage. Nothing more I can say about that...