Many Recalls and a Transmission Issue that is Unfixable
This is my third Hyundai in six years, and second Santa Fe in a row. I really want to like this vehicle. The color (Earthy Brass Matte) with brown leather on the inside of my Limited trim. The technology is great, it punches above its class for the price you pay. However, the vehicle has had ~8 recalls. Every time I take it in to get them fixed, a few weeks later I get another notice. I am driving about 6,000 miles per year (I work from home and travel a lot), it is mostly from my house to the airport. When I bought the car, the dealership forced a PLAID service on me that can track where you vehicle is at anytime, something the Bluelink app already does. The owner of PLAID actually goes back to Ken Garff out of Utah, so it is their own little scam to get an extra $2,000 out of customers. Within the first 1,000 miles when I would park the car and travel for a week, I would get Bluelink notifications that my battery was low and non-responsive. This was stress inducing, but every time I came back to my car it turned over just fine. So that seemed like a bug. Then I had the volume on my music go all the way to full volume and none of the volume knobs would work. I turned the car off and then back on and still no luck. The closest dealership was ~100 miles away, so I rolled the windows down, put in some ear plugs and drove to the dealership. They did a hard reset on the system and that resolved it. I have ~13,000 miles on the car and for the past 10,000 miles, I am getting a transmission error and it tells me to check the oil level and not to drive. If I drive on the error the car is limited to 40 miles per hour. If I turn the car off and restart it goes away. By the way, the transmission system is sealed, so no way to check the oil or anything. It has been in the dealership several times and the say there are no error codes logged and they can’t do anything unless they see the error themselves. They will not explore further since the transmission is a sealed system. They even have tried to charge me a diagnostic fee as well. Unfortunately, since I rarely drive it, the error comes up on my way to the airport or doctor’s appointment so I have few chances to get it to the dealership with the error. The past 2,000 miles the infotainment system with Apple CarPlay is having issues connecting to my phone requiring me to unpair it altogether and repair. Now the infotainment screen is also having a red color move across the screen. All of that being said, this is the last straw for Hyundai. I get with more technology there are more bugs, but this is become too much. In fact, I just bought a new car with 10 months left on my Hyundai lease because I can’t trust my Santa Fe and am done with it and will make my payments and turn it in.