I bought a Hyundai Santa Fe new in 2001. I also bought a years worth of oil changes. There was, and still is, an intermittent problem involving the lights. The lights go off by themselves while driving. This problem was reported four times when the vehicle was brought in for service, however I never noticed that although I told the service manager he neglected to put it in the computer and being that this was an intermittent problem it could not be found.

Lets fast forward to 2005. I brought the vehicle in again for the lighting issue and this time he could fix it, for a fee. The vehicle had less than the 100,000 miles but that did not matter. I told him that it was in here before for the same reason, at least four times, however, as he showed me, there was no documentation in the computer.

Now the complaint. I called Hyundai USA in 2005 and the customer service rep. told me that this was a used vehicle and a used vehicle had a different warranty. I asked her what she meant and she told me that this vehicle was titled before. She would not give me the name of the previous owner however. I explained to her that this vehicle was sold to me as a new vehicle. This complaint was transferred to the Dallas regional area where I sent them the original bill of sale. After not hearing back from them I contacted the customer service people again and I was told that there is not a regional office in the Dallas area. However, when I brought up a gentleman’s name, and the fact that I sent him documentation and had paperwork with a letterhead on it, he agreed that there was another office. What Hyundai wanted me to do was send them all my paperwork so that they could change theirs showing me to be the only owner of this vehicle. I refused and wanted to know what type of restitution I would receive for this deceptive trade.

After another phone call last year I was asked if a certain mechanic in the Houston area had called me. No, no one called. I asked for his name so I could contact him and they would not give it to me.

This has been an issue since 2005 that Hundai refuses to make amends for. I even tried the Hyundai web site, to see if I could e-mail the president of Hyundai USA, however all correspondence leads to the customer service people which as you can see this service does not exist. As of today October 18,2006 Hyundai has refused to acknowledge this complaint even though through their own admission they did acknowledge that this was in fact a used vehicle.

I would like to thank the Readers Digest for writing an article about this web site in the October 2006 edition. Had I have known about this web site previously I would have posted this earlier.

In closing I know that the question out there is, would I buy another Hyundai? My answer to you is after reading this, would you.

Thank you for your time,

Robert