10.0

really awful
Typical Repair Cost:
No data
Average Mileage:
43,000 miles
Total Complaints:
1 complaints

Most common solutions:

  1. not sure (1 reports)
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problem #1

Nov 012013

Santa Fe Limited

  • Automatic transmission
  • 43,000 miles

Bought Santa Fe 2007 for our daughter who spent 6 of those years on college campus she only has 50K miles it's on it's 3rd transmission. They cannot tell her why? In the past year have had an intermittently recurring problem in which the car simply will not start. Dash lights like battery is working but the engine makes no signs of working. This has happened after driving 10 miles ...30 miles 300 or none at all! She gets stranded. In the past year she has taken to the dealer at least 6 times!!! They can not get it to replicate. Basically she has a car that will NOT work!!!! Or it works when it wants too! Hyundai has kept it for a week and it worked fine. There have been multiple times where she has been stuck for 3 hours and when the truck arrives it magically starts. We feel our daughter is completely UNSAFE in this car. With it's history on record who would buy this vehicle. Your company refuses to buy it back!!!! At this point she does not have a reliable vehicle and the dealer says they can do nothing?" PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!

* The issue in a nutshell is that at semi-predictable (but also random) times I turn the key in the ignition, and the car will not start. I get all the dash lights and indicators that the battery is working, but no sound from the starter or the engine - not even a clicking like the starter is working or the engine is trying to turn over.

It happens at random times, and will go weeks without any issue before suddenly popping up again. Often if I just wait about 10 minutes or so, it will eventually work for me. There have been multiple instances though where it takes more like an hour or more.

It usually acts up after I've been driving for some amount of time - for instance the 16 miles/25 minutes to Oshkosh or Fond du Lac, usually after I've arrived at one place, turned off the car, run into a store or something, turn the car back on just fine, drive maybe a block or so to another location, turn off the car and run inside, and then the car won't want to start back up. Again, in these instances it usually takes around 10 minutes for the car to pick back up.

All that said, there have been times when it's been sitting over night, I go out to the parking lot to start it, and it simply won't work. In these case there hasn't been any previous driving - it just seems to be random. There will be periods of time that are worse than others. I've wondered before whether it's worse in the cold, only to find that through most of January and February I had no issues.

The only thing that is 100% predictable is that once I've been driving it for a substantial period of time (for instance the 4 hours/250 miles from Wisconsin to Indiana, or Ohio to Indiana), it WILL refuse to start once I stop for gas. Once again, it may start just fine when I initially start and stop it to fill up the gas tank, but once I pull around, turn it off again to run inside a convenience store, and try to start again, it will give me trouble. Sometimes this will only take 15 minutes or so to resolve itself. But these recovery periods are nearly always longer, and there's been one time in particular that it took about 2 hours for it to finally get going again. I was actually on the phone with a tow company at the time, randomly tried starting it again, and it "magically" worked.

Anytime I'm driving back here from Ohio, once I get it into the parking lot here and turn it off, I can almost bank on the car not being able to start again until the next day. I basically just have to hope that it will recover for me after the one time I have to stop for gas between Ohio and Wisconsin, then refuse to stop driving it until I get it back into my space here and plan on not having a functioning vehicle until the next day.

I've taken it into the dealership several times and they've been unable to replicate the problem. They had it for a full week at one point, going out every hour or so during the work day to turn it on, drive it around the lot, turn it off, etc, and the problem would not replicate.

And that is my semi long but general overview.

- Donna W., Thompson, OH, US