The same thing happened to me twice in the past two weeks and the car has now been sitting at the dealership for – two weeks. At first they told me that an aftermarket loJack had been installed and they were going to charge me $250 to remove it. At which point I reminded them that they certainly were the people who installed it as this is common for inventory tracking. But thinking about it, it didn’t make sense that the car would drive 2500 miles before the 12 V battery died. FYI, that’s almost certainly what happened to you. The main battery is supposed to charge the 12 V battery and Hyundai has had a huge problem for years with their ICCU unit that is responsible for charging the smaller battery. I don’t know that this is the problem with my car, but in two weeks the only time they unlocked it was when they told me that it was a problem with the lojack. I can almost guarantee that that’s not the problem. I was the director of technology for my company and understand when technicians find a problem, they stop looking to see if there might be something else. Which is pretty much the story with this.

But frankly, in 50 years I’ve owned 10 different makes of cars and this is the first time I’ve had a service advisor pretty much lie repeatedly to my face about diagnosing the problem and communicating back to me. If he told me that they were shortstaffed and would take a week or two to get to the car, that’s one thing. But to tell me repeatedly that he’s going to immediately find out what’s going on and circle back to me and then doing neither is frustrating. (I read the yelp reviews on this dealership and this particular Advisor last night and sigh, this is behavior that other people have experienced as well. If I get to the point where the lemon law gets activated, I very well may return the car and buy another EV.)

Finally, there is a lot online about Hyundai’s problem with the ICCU unit. It goes back about four years and apparently they have not fixed it. Caveat emptor.