Quality problem with Hyundai

hi,
I am new to this forum. I have a question that I believe some people may be informed about. I am an industrial and mechanical engineer who also worked in some car companies but it has been a while and need to refresh memory. We have a Hyundai Elentra, as a family car. In a heavy rain, the car was flooded with a leakage from the bottom and the when we took it to the mechanic we were informed that the airbag was out of order. We needed to change it. Now, to me this is a big safety issue. How can a car be flooded by rain water and even if so, how can a car company design cars so that the airbag would be destroyed by such a defect? We could have noticed this during an accident as well, losing our lives!! I am suing Hyundai and I need the regulations that are about the quality tests on rain water and safety. Please help me with your knowledge on the issue.

1.) Hyundia is getting better by the day, and iwth the 10 year warranty (which is longer than most people keep a new car) who cares if s**t breaks.

2.) The air bag is a safety aid device, more to keep you from smashing your face into the dash than to keep you alive. Wear your seatbelt...its your #1 safety device next to driving safe.

3.)Welcome to the forum, when you start threads like this be sure to give the year as well as the make and modle :)

Not to be rude and uninformative, but what kind of engineer drives a hyundai? You really have no basis to sue, you were informed of the problem, and unless it is something that has happend many times it is not a quality control or design issue.

Not to be rude and uninformative, but what kind of engineer drives a hyundai? You really have no basis to sue, you were informed of the problem, and unless it is something that has happend many times it is not a quality control or design issue.

Although I can't speak for myself, some automotive engineers don't care about performance. Any car is quick enough to get tickets. I'd never buy a Hyundai, but it's hard to beat that 10 year warranty.

hi,
I am suing Hyundai and I need the regulations that are about the quality tests on rain water and safety.
You're an engineer, so you'll understand when I say that a product has to meet certain criteria, and beyond that, it's just icing on the cake. Especially in the field of quality control (specifically in lean manufacturing), if a product doesn't need to do something and it costs money to make it do that something, that feature should be removed to cut costs. For example, if a metal product will never see exposure to moisture, then it shouldn't be painted. If a product won't see exposure to high stresses, it can be flimsy to save costs.

Cars aren't required to shield you from the elements. This is only a requirement to sell the cars (because nobody wants a leaky car), but it's not an absolute requirement to shield them from liability. For example, convertible tops leak all the time.

If this is an isolated case, you'd have a hard time proving it's a design defect. Even so, they spotted the problem and told you about it, so there's no fraud there. Did they offer to fix the air bag? Air bags have been required on cars since 1996, but once you were informed that they don't work, they're relieved of liability when they fail to deploy because you already knew the car was out of spec.

Everybody is so sue-happy these days, and this increases the costs of EVERYTHING. Companies have to buy insurnace just to cover litigation costs, and this goes back into the price of products. One particular example of this is in the aircraft manufacturing industry. A $90 000 airplane (the cheapest on the market) might cost you $30 000 in supplies, labor, and engineering, and $60 000 is in liability insurance for the company. It's sad, and until there's a "losers pay" tort reform, it will continue to happen. (Even if the company wins the case, it still costs them a lot of money to fight it.)

Going back to your particular situation, you have no cause to sue. Anybody who's taken a basic highschool law class knows that there are four elements of tort negligence. (Wikipedia serves as a good reference because I forgot specifically what they are...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligence


1. Duty
2. Breach of duty
3. Causation
4. Damage

For #1, Hyundai has a duty to make cars that are acceptably safe in an accident, but I'm not sure if airbag deployment is an absolute necessity once they told you it didn't work. This is sketchy in my opinion. Once they said your car wasn't safe, it wasn't their responsibility to allow you to assume it was safe.

For #2, a "reasonable person" could not have forseen that the car leaked and caused the airbag to deploy. Once they found out, they took the actions of a "resonable person" to fix the problem. They can't see the future.

#3 is irrelevant because #4 never occured. You never got into an accident, so there was never any actual damage. You have nothing to sue for because there were never any actual damages. Any lawyer that pulls something out of his rectal cavity to try to prove "pain and suffering" knows neither pain nor suffering. Sure, the car was undrivable by federal standards, but whether they fixed the airbag is important here. All you might get for it is the cost of repairing the problem and maybe the cost of renting a car while it's being repaired.

I'm sorry, but the issue of overlitigation just annoys me. It costs everybody money.

Not to be rude and uninformative, but what kind of engineer drives a hyundai?Actually, I do. I am a mechanical engineer with over 20 years experience in the defense, aerospace and automotive industries. Last summer, I test drove and investigated several cars without preconceived brand loyalties (I have owned more Fords than anything else).

In an impartial search for a small hatchback, I looked at the Ford Focus, Chevy Aveo, Chevy Malibu Maxx, Mazda3 wagon, Honda Civic, Volkswagen Golf, Toyota Matrix/Pontiac Vibe, Scion xA & xB, Suzuki Aerio & Reno, Kia Spectra5 and Hyundai Elantra. In the end, the Hyundai Elantra delivered the best balance of fuel economy, environmental friendliness, performance, comfort, convenience, space and value.

It's a good car, especially for the money. What kind of engineers drive Hyundais? Smart ones. :D (Oh... and if you didn't know, Hyundai was the top non-luxury nameplate, third overall behind Porshe and Lexus, in the most recent JD Powers Initial Quality Survey.)

Initial being a key word their. I need to find the copy of that ten year warranty agreement, had it somewhere from where my sister baught one a while back... has more stipulations than a mail order german bride with a illiterate translator.

Good IQS usually leads to good longterm reliability.

I think if you treat a car right, it will treat you right. I drove a Ford Aspire for almost 10 years and 120k miles and it was a *very* reliable car. When I sold it last fall, everything on it still worked.

Good IQS usually leads to good longterm reliability.

I think if you treat a car right, it will treat you right. I drove a Ford Aspire for almost 10 years and 120k miles and it was a *very* reliable car. When I sold it last fall, everything on it still worked.

That's good to hear. I drive a Saturn ION, and while it may be one of the best 4-cylinder American cars you can get (full of Opel parts), it doesn't rank high in very many areas.

Getting back to the Hyundai's air bag........... there are more airbag components than just the bag itself. It relies on electronic sensors and controls (located some distance away from the bag itself) for correct deployment. It is quite possible it is one of these parts that has failed and not the actual bag itself.

It is possible that one of these electronic components became submerged and/or damaged by moisture. Of course, such components are designed to be fairly rugged, but submersion, especially for an interior component may be beyond it's design parameters.

Finally, if you do not agree with one mechanic's diagnosis, get a second opinion/estimate by going to a different shop or dealership.

just to point out some obvious issues here: The reason most cars get flooded with rain water is because people park under trees, get a bunch of leaves, pine needles, etc into the runners underneath the wiper area, which is also the intake for the climate control systems, there are drains there to deal with water, but the drains get clogged by debris. Then you get water into the car.

If that is the case here....then is completely your fault.

I've always thought stupidity should hurt. Never understood getting money from a company for your own stupidity.....as they say "make something fool proof, and somebody will make a better fool"