Worldwide recall according to this 11 Oct news item.

I believe it to be the porous separator, as shown below.

 

Since no exact cause was found I assume Hyundai will check if BMS has been upgraded first then check all cells of the battery see if there is any abnormal. If bad cells are found Hyundai will replace partial or whole battery. If no problem found Hyundai will do nothing except for the BMS upgrade. We will know soon.


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What electriceddy said: I started to wonder, is it LG or some other battery source that's
in question? Why the nominal geographic limit, if cars for all markets used the same brand
of cells, or maybe they didn't??

Now my local EV-aware friends are all like "OMG battery fires you're driving a bomb".
The press needs to spend less time sensationalizing this and more time holding Hyundai's
feet to the fire for a straight story.

_H*

 

It could be that they all use the same cells, but since the majority of vehicles were sold in S.K. (and since they are clearly getting pressure from the S.K. government) they started by focusing their efforts on that market to start. Looks like they're expanding it to all markets now.

Could also be that there is some other difference between models made for the S.K. market and overseas, due to regulatory requirements, and they were thinking that might affect the issue. I don't know nearly enough about car manufacturing to put that out as a real possibility, though. It seems the *actual* problem is still poorly understood, and the BMS update coming as part of the recall is more for diagnostics than an actual fix.

Yeah the optics of it all are poor, to be kind about it. The only defense is to point out that vehicle fires in general are a lot more common that you might imagine, though that's little comfort. It's a numbers game; whenever you have a ton of energy bottled up, there's always a risk of it getting out in an unintended (and dramatic) way.

Nothing to do now but wait and see if I get a recall notice...

 

I personally am hoping the September 2019 start date for this is accurate, since mine was well before that.

 

I think of it kind of like the oil light on an ICE car. It tells you something is wrong, and you need to address it, but it doesn't diagnose the underlying problem.

Anyone who has already had the BMS update might not even get a recall.

Not only is the optics poor, but Hyundai has not communicated at all about what is going on. Even when the BMS update was being pushed out, they really told us next to nothing about what it actually changed or why it might be important. My initial reaction was that it wasn't urgent, and I could get it done whenever I got around to going into the dealer again. And with covid, that got pushed off quite a bit.

And they need to make a strong commitment that replacement batteries will be readily available for those cars that need it.

 

Do we know for certain that the BMS update that removed the AUX Battery Saver function etc. is the update related to this recall?

Maybe they started seeing some results from that update's rollout in the form of failures/warnings and decided the problem was bad enough to go full recall rather than risk continuing to do it more covertly.

 

I think you are right.

Hyundai is not communicating very well at all. They didn't originally tell us what the BMS update actually did, they have not yet told us what the proposed recall will do. And for those of us waiting for replacement batteries, they aren't telling us when the batteries will be delivered. I was kind of hoping that this latest flurry of news would release the logjam, and that we might get some information. But so far nothing.

 

One of the things that the BMS update does is tighten the spec on maximum cell deviation. At least one car in the UK had to have a battery replaced after the update. (Info from a Hyundai tech)

 

I know - my wife has the Note 8. We had to spend extra on the thing since the '7' got pulled from the shelves.

 

I carefully read the thread, and it seemed like the car owner either got a buyback or a replacement car.

I read the TSB for what is involved to swap the actual battery. It really isn't a horrible procedure, but you do need to have the new battery on hand before you can really start. Maybe it is the case that they were holding these back until they were more sure that the issue was resolved - I don't know. Another case of horrible communication from Hyundai.

 

It would be helpful if Hyundai would let us know if all the fires were charged up to 100%. If it's a 5% decrease in capacity, I could theoretically, live with that if it means no fires.. but 20% would be too much.

 

Maybe this has been asked but what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Park the car outside? Not charge above 80%?

 

Good question. Hyundai hasn't said anything.

For you I guess the 1st question is whether you have had the BMS update or not.