Sent to a local Hyundai dealership, 210322, in response to the flood
of mailings
I kept getting from them about Recall 196 and how urgent it was.
I called bullshit:
Subject: waiting on campaign 196 Hi, I was told that I can use this email to reach the service management of your organization. I want to clarify a couple of things about Recall 196, which applies to my own vehicle. I have received several notices and letters about it, and am quite familiar with the situation. In fact, I am familiar with some aspects of it that your staff may not be. The procedures and explanation behind this keep changing, and it is mostly because Hyundai is not being straight with the public as to what's going on with it. Bottom line, the battery packs have to be replaced, to get the potentially defective cells out of there. In the meantime, Hyundai Korea has been extraordinarily tight-lipped about it all, shifting blame to LG Chem and anybody else they could finger, and giving more priority to some notion of "saving face" than actually being clear about the problem and fixing it. We have several horror stories about ECU reflashes not being performed right, failing halfway through due to 12V auxiliary batteries going dead and completely "bricking" customers' cars, and/or reduced range from artificial charge limits as temporary guesswork toward safer operation. Every dealership service department should be up in arms about this, telling Hyundai corporate to stop screwing around and misleading the public. It is insulting to the dealerships that they are being made the public face of Hyundai's failings. These interim ECU update band-aids are clearly not the right answer, and from what I understand Hyundai is slowly facing the fact that they have to replace on the order of 80,000 battery packs worldwide. I run some OBD-II tools and have deeper insight into the state of my own pack than most drivers, and my cell voltages have never deviated more that 0.02V from lowest to highest. I generally limit my charges to 80% anyway, so I'm not particularly worried about overcharge situations in the near term. Some of the reflashes also change functionality in an undesireable way, for instance no longer allowing disablement of the "battery saver" feature which has proven to do more harm than good. Thus, only controller functionality directly related to the *high-voltage* battery management system should be messed with, and other existing firmware left alone. The TSBs describe how GDS allows separation of those updates into individual procedures, rather than trying to run the "batch". So until such time as your service department is tooled up and trained up to replace packs, i.e. having the appropriate lift table and related gear and the ability to order and ship the replacements, I see no point in bringing the vehicle in. Last time I was in there for something minor I was basically treated like a child, told to go wait in a corner without having my questions answered to satisfaction. When your senior people can assure me that they can do these replacements and ancillary work per MY choices as the vehicle owner, without treating me like a second-class citizen in the process but instead exhibiting some level of tech-to-tech respect in our conversation, I'll think about it. Attached is a shot of the label on the rear of my pack, for reference. Thank you _H*## ATT: 312pack_s.jpg