-To top it off, Hyundai Motor has notified Santa Fe MD owners of the recall not via email or text messages, but via regular mail, which cannot confirm whether the mail recipient has actually received the mail.
SEOUL KOREA - Hyundai Motor, which is likely to be slammed with US federal penalties of USD 100 million for “systematically” and “egregiously” overstating the fuel economy of its vehicles in the US, is not behaving itself on home turf either. It is misleading Korean consumers, skillfully sugarcoating the recall order, issued by the TS, with the word ‘reward.’
The official website (www.car.go.kr) of the TS has classified the Hyundai Santa Fe MD case as a recall. And an official from the TS has clearly confirmed that it was a recall order. Still, Hyundai Motor is repackaging what it was ordered to do for using “cherry picking” data in calculating fuel efficiency into “Santa Fe Mileage Rewards Program(santafeinfo.hyundai.com).”
The bigger problem is that though the TS has issued an order that covers all the Santa Fe MD vehicles, Hyundai Motor has arbitrarily set a maximum car ownership period, eligible for the so-called rewards program, at 5 years. As a result, a driver who drove a Santa Fe MD vehicle for one year will receive KRW 80,000 in compensation while compensation payments to the owners of Santa Fe MD vehicles for 5 years and over will never exceed the maximum amount of KRW 400,000.
“We have mailed the owners of Santa Fe MD vehicles letters saying that they are eligible for the “rewards” program,” said Lee Ki-hoon, deputy head of Hyundai Motor’s PR Department.
According to the TS, Hyundai Motor did notify its customers oddly via regular mail, not registered mail, email, or text messages. Those who have yet to receive or open the regular mail will never know that their Santa Fe MD vehicles cars have been recalled. Consequently, Hyundai Motor will gleefully cough up less money than it should.
Dressing up the TS’s recall order as a mileage rewards program, Hyundai Motor managed to stay clear of nationwide criticism and a severe blow to its reputation. What’s more, it avoided the quickest and surest way of informing consumers (e.g. email, text message) and opted for regular mail in a bid to fork out less money than it should.
“We have clearly sent out a recall order to Hyundai Motor. The TS can order Hyundai Motor to change the way it describes the recall order on its website. However, Hyundai will resort to hearings or lawsuits in response, so the government is caught between a rock and a hard place,” an official from the TS expressed frustration.
“Hyundai Motor would never be able to act like that if this happened in foreign countries, especially in the US. Hyundai Motor thinks of the Korean government and Korean customers as uber-wimpy pushovers,” ranted an owner of the recalled Santa Fe MD model, only identified by his surname Song.
In November, Hyundai Motor and its Kia Motors affiliate were slapped with USD 100 million in federal penalties for overstating the fuel economy of its 1.2 million vehicles. In addition to paying USD 100 million to the US federal government, they also have to forfeit roughly USD 200 million in emissions credits and to invest another USD 50 million in internal corporate changes to genuinely improve fuel economy.
By Lee Jae-seung
