Hyundai safety and reliability

By Stuart Johnston

Today Hyundai is one of the leading car brands in the world, especially when it comes to reliability and safety. But when the Korean cars arrived in South Africa they were perceived pretty much as bargain specials.

Hyundai had a roller-coaster start to its presence in South Africa. In late 1993, Hyundai Motor Distributors was set up under joint ownership of Hyundai in Korea and Wheels for Africa, a trucking company operated by Zimbabwean Billy Rautenbach.

Hyundai looked like revolutionising the South African motor industry from the get-go, as it offered feature-laden cars at prices that were some 20 per cent less than the equivalent products from the opposition. The first model introduced was the rather Plain-Jane Elantra, off-set a few months later by the decidedly odd-looking Hyundai S-Coupe.

However,  Hyundai’s dealerships placed an amazing emphasis on service, staying open until late in the evening and even trading on Sundays! This soon won many fans.

How did Billy Rautenbach achieve this? He saw a loop hole in the South African tax regulations that allowed cars to be shipped here in semi-knocked down form. This state of assembly allowed for a tax duty of 25 per cent to be paid to the government, at a time when fully-assembled imports were subject to a 115 per cent import tax. A semi-knocked down kit would see the cars arrive in crates with items like the wheels, engines and gearboxes still needing installation.

In those days, when the country was just emerging from its apartheid era protectionism, cars sold locally had to have a massive amount of local content to avoid import taxes. The idea was to protect the local motor industry and jobs, and it had worked well for decades, if somewhat inefficiently.

Part of the problem was that our car prices were high because of the tiny-by-comparison numbers in which cars were manufactured here. Rautenbach could take advantage of pricing for Hyundai products that were produced for massive right-hand-drive markets, including Korea, Japan and the UK. So a 25 per cent tax enabled him to offer enticing  discounts relevant to the time.

His so-called assembly plant was located in Botswana, but there were rumours that the only parts that were assembled on these so-called semi-knocked down kits, imported from Korea,  were the wheels! In any event, the wheels fell off the Wheels for Africa enterprise at the start of the new millennium,  Rautenbach went into exile, and the Imperial Group took over the Hyundai brand, an association that proved to be extremely beneficial to all concerned.

One of the best things that Imperial did was to honour agreements with Hyundai owners regarding warranties and spares provision. Furthermore, by the late 1990s, the Hyundai products were becoming much more cutting-edge in terms of styling, road behaviour and performance.

The Rise and Rise of Hyundai in South Africa

At its peak, the Hyundai brand under Rautenbach had captured 10 per cent of the South African passenger car market. These days, Hyundai has consistently been vying for third place overall in the passenger market, behind Volkswagen and Toyota ( Toyota, with its significant  commercial vehicle and all-conquering  Hilux pick-up sales, is of course the undisputed overall number one manufacturer here).

As an example, since July this year Hyundai has placed ahead of the likes of Ford, Nissan and Renault in the new passenger car market, out-gunning these traditional players. In fact, soon after the World Cup here in 2010, Hyundai was vying with the mighty Toyota for second position in the passenger car category. It helped that Hyundai gained massive brand awareness as a sponsor for the 2010- FIFA World Cup.  Price increases forced upon Hyundai South Africa have since seen that challenge fade, but for a company that imports its entire passenger line-up, third place is not to be sneezed at.

Safety

Hyundai’s safety ratings have always been good in global testing and they have improved steadily as the company has targeted success in the sophisticated European passenger car market. The exception to this rule has been the Hyundai i10 entry-level model, which was controversially  on sale for a number of years without an airbag.

This has been rectified with the Grand i10 which has taken over the entry-level mantle at Hyundai (the cheapest model starts at R162 900) which has two airbags, and ABS braking as standard.

In fact the airbag count in even lower level models like the Accent 1.6 Fluid (priced at R299 900) has risen to six, and the more sophisticated models in the Hyundai range have many extra safety systems like corner-assist to help the driver avoiding having an accident in the first place.

Reliability

Even in the early days of its presence here, Hyundai’s became known for their reliability, especially in the entry-level models like the early Accents. The testimony to this fact is the number of old Accents  (and Elantras) still  running around that are close to 20 years old.

An interesting note here is that Hyundai is a conservative engineering company, as can be seen by the low number of turbocharged models in their line-ups. Turbochargers in any car give great performance, but they still do fail, no matter what brand of car they are attached to!

An after-warranty (non-franchised)  workshop manager we consulted on this subject confirmed that Hyundai as a brand is  generally bullet-proof. We have known some of the older Tucson diesel models to give injector trouble, but at very high mileage, and these “fails”  were probably largely down to poor maintenance. Our workshop manager said that as far as the older Elantras and Accents are concerned, they need to be serviced regularly, and the sieve in the oil pump area in the sump needs to be kept clean of carbon.  So this needs to be regularly attended to on older models.