3 September - Computers on wheels
Note: This blog which is about how Hyundai UK must be the worst for Customer Service of any UK based
car distributor was written early today but not posted until after a dealer visit as they were
keeping me in the dark and I needed to check if there were any mitigating circumstances.
Basically there are not and a further report will have to be written. The
dealer’s news could not have been worse.
He is trapped by Hyundai’s utterly useless procedures and inefficiencies
but his failure to answer phone calls or email doesn’t help.
Seven
years ago I bought a new car, electric because my internationally acknowledged motor engineer son told me
they were the future, that hybrids were a silly compromise and that hydrogen will
never happen. The Hyundai Kona was the first car that would get me to his home
in Wiltshire and back home again without having to charge the battery
en-route.
As you can see, I was treated like Royalty when buying the car on Day 1 of
availability in the UK. Hyundai encouraged its early buyers to join a Facebook
Group and I was one of the founder members. I still read it occasionally and
seem to be the only Day 1 owner still driving the same car. (There are some Day 3s and Day 6s.)
I immediately took to the electric car, quiet, no gear changing, no possibility
of stalling the thing and easily first away from the lights when boy racers were still
impatiently revving Ford Escorts.
It has never gone wrong, well two halogen lamps have failed, cornering and
courtesy, the others are all LED and I have never had to pay for charging away
from home - because I haven’t needed to. The brake pads are still as good as new because
the regenerative braking does nearly all the work. I changed the tyres at 24,000
miles, not because they were worn out but the factory fitted items were renowned for excessive road
noise and wheel spin. Michelins were much quieter.
Ownership qualifies me for Octopus’s seven pence a unit tariff so except for the
£30k. purchase price it has been dirt cheap motoring.
The downside has been Hyundai
UK and to some extent their dealers. One in Maidstone (the nearest service depot of
the dealer I purchased from) said they were going to call the police because I
took a photograph of my own car as it was going on the ramp. It was the first
opportunity I had of looking at the underside. After the manager was told where
he could go he sent me a whole series of emails explaining how I had
broken the law. Idiot. Obviously he killed any possibility that I would ever buy
a another car from him.
Fortunately Ancaster in Welling switched from being a Vauxhall
(?) dealership to
Hyundai and the manager there was brilliant and always took a close interest in
my EV. Unfortunately Lee was transferred elsewhere and has recently left the
company. It was somewhat downhill from there.
Hyundai UK soon acquired a reputation on the Facebook Group for being uncaring
and unresponsive to those who contacted them and then in November 2020 they
dropped their bombshell. A number of cars had been fitted with a
potentially faulty LG battery and the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency was
insisting on it being replaced as a matter of urgency. Three further letters said
that the replacement would take a maximum of five days during which an identical
electric car would be provided and the job completed by October 2021.
Meanwhile I must not park it under cover - my garage - or charge it fully - so I
could not drive to Wiltshire and back any more. The restrictions would have
caused higher insurance costs, more weather related depreciation and on road
charging costs. I was given no compensation whatsoever.
And I heard no more.
At recent car anniversaries I emailed Hyundai UK to ask about their rate of
progress and why the oldest cars have been left until last.
Last year they said on a Wednesday that they would call me on the Friday to arrange
a battery replacement. This year they asked me to be patient as they hadn’t got
any batteries or technician capacity. Hyundai UK is a company that can
warn owners in 2020 that their car might catch fire (and
world-wide 14 did) and should not be kept in a garage or charged
excessively but five years later are content to risk owners being incinerated.
Nevertheless I
judged that as only 0.0001% of the affected LG batteries had caught fire, the
delayed DVSA recall was not much of a problem and the later I was given a new
battery the better. There is not much to go wrong with an EV and a replacement
battery will give it a new lease of life. Having said that the old battery is
still doing 100% of the miles it did when new. Driven carefully I can get close to a 400 mile range.
This week the car is seven years old and with a month’s notice I booked a service
and MOT. Unfortunately Ancaster has moved from Welling to Perry Street,
Chislehurst but I arrived there before opening time on Monday morning thanks to
Thames Water not having left any unattended holes along the route.
I sat in the waiting room, at first with two other drivers and later on, a few more.
It was a little annoying to be placed sixth in their queue at opening time. One of
the receptionists noticed that queue jumping was going on but her client who had
blatantly queue jumped protested his innocence. When my time came I commented on
the queuing situation but was basically told that I couldn’t count.
Whatever happened to the ‘Customer is Always Right’? Getting close to calling a
customer a liar is not the best way of forming a relationship, so we were not off to a
good start and I got the impression that my receptionist was not really interested in anything I might say.
It doesn’t help that Ancaster place a computer screen between receptionist and customer so that there can be little human
interaction as neither can see each other. It is very
off-putting.
By the time I left, my phone had a text message on it with a link to a service
progress chart. By 11 a.m. it showed a half way marker but over the next four
hours it did not move at all. Then my phone rang for all of four seconds.
The number indicated it was Hyundai so I called it. After three seconds under
nine minutes I was told no service agents were available. Fortunately I still
had the phone in hand when it rang again. The Ancaster lady said it was bad news and I
thought an MOT failure perhaps, but it was far worse than that.
I was told that they had applied a software update but it had failed half way
through and now the car would not start up at all. Hyundai HQ had told them it
must go back to their main depot in Tilbury because the update had likely
screwed up the battery fatally.
I accepted it calmly, these things happen, and was assured that I would be kept
informed of progress. I have not been. I tried phoning and that took another nine
minutes listening to a message about buying a new car from Ancaster. What a way
to treat potential customers.
The email address Ancaster had used to contact me proved to be ‘No Reply’ although
it didn’t say so. Brilliant; but I found another which did work. Unfortunately
there was no response to that either.
So I am now carless and haven’t a clue about what is going on.
How to treat customers. Not. This afternoon I shall have to catch an SL3 to Sidcup hospital
and make my way from there.
Note: Even after seven years, dealers do not really
understand electric cars. My guess is that the software detected the known
manufacturing defect in the LG battery and closed the system down for safety
reasons. The software probably did not trip over itself and wreck the system as
was implied but instead did what it was supposed to do. Disable a battery
known to have been assembled incorrectly. It
is, after all, four years since Hyundai said that things may become critical
and it is well known that the fault becomes worse over time. Because they have
so badly let customers down the dealer is having to pick up the problems.
Probably I should inform the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency that their
instructions have been so flagrantly disregarded by Hyundai UK.