Coleage at work has a 4 Wheel drive Santa Fe Auto, the car is only just over 3 years old and has 25K on the clock, of which 12,000 miles of these have been done in his ownership.

The car recently broke down on a long distance trip to Spain, and required the services of a breakdown company in Southern France and after a lot of back and forth the car was recently repatriated back to the UK after being quoted prices in the region of 10K euros to get it fixed in France.

Events leading up to the breakdown.

Whilst waiting in a queue at a toll booth, the car in front needed to reverse out, so he selected reverse and after the car had gone he tried to drive forwards but had no forward drive. Upto this point the car was running fine with no issues.

The UK dealer who has looked at the car has said this.

Unfortunately there are no fault codes recorded on the diagnostic equipment, the system shows us that the electronic selection is operating but hydraulically nothing is happening inside the gearbox. We can see the correct operation of reverse gear and 1st forward gear valve control however no hydraulic pressure is present. We have spoken to Hyundai’s auto box specialist who have confirmed failure of forward gear hydraulic control.

Could this be the case, or could it be something else.

You should get a P1529 if the box itself knows something is wrong. P1529 is an instruction to turn on the EML. If it was part of the solenoid pack that was faulty, I would expect to see P0755 and/or P0760.

If the control unit is dead, then you wouldn't get any codes but this is unusual. The first thing I would check is power to the control unit.

Interesting, he is being quoted the best part of 3K to sort the car out and is now getting others involved, since with only 25K on the clock he feels that a gearbox should not fail at this age /mileage.

Do they not have a 5 year warranty on them?

Phil

its a 2007 car, which apparently went out of warranty earlier this year.

Just had a look at my notes. I've only ever seen a couple of these, but one had similar symptoms and it turned out to be the loom inside the box.

its a 2007 car, which apparently went out of warranty earlier this year.

Oh damn. That's unfortunate. I say he needs to push hyundai with this.

My mum's partner had a Hyundai (can't remember which. The people carrier type thing) and the front suspension completely broke and detatched at one side. The car had done very few miles really and had only just gone out of the warranty period. Hyundai re-imbursed for the cost of the parts at the garage that did the repairs.

Phil