Two Sore Backs

Edit: I’ve back dated this post to November 27 to allow Val’s post to be the last for our cross Canada trip! 

Val has the last post for the Canada trip on her to-do list. It’s not procrastination so much as uncertainty regarding the car that explains the delay here, so I’m sneaking in with this update.

Long story short, we still don’t have the car, primarily due to parts availability. We’ll get it in July when we return from our next trip, which starts on Feb 12.

Here’s the long story. The car arrived in Richmond within a week or so of our arrival back in Vancouver. As you may recall, we had decided it was best to repair it in Vancouver rather than Ontario.

It took several tries to find a collision repair shop on the North Shore – Hyundai parts availability is pretty disastrous these days – but eventually Kirmac Collision took pity on us. (After I told them we wouldn’t require a loaner!)

Kirmac had to re-estimate the damage, and while doing so they found some damage on the underside of the vehicle. They asked us if the rear-end collision had “pushed us into a ditch?”. They sent us this photo:

We knew right away when the scrapes had happened. On August 17 we decided to take the more “direct” route from Cape Ray, Newfoundland, to the campground at J.T. Cheeseman provincial park. The Park is just around the corner from Port Aux Basques.

This entire area had been devastated by hurricane Fiona. (Val talked about this in her August 30 Port Aux Basques post.) The route was a gravel road that started out pretty good but deteriorated more and more as we descended towards the seaside. We got into a situation where all of the fine material had been washed from the roadbed, leaving a sea of rocks and boulders. We were as careful as possible, picking our way through the rubble at probably 3kph, but we winced more than once when we grounded out. The Hyundai’s 8″ clearance and long wheel base makes it a sketchy off-road vehicle.

At about the same time that Kirmac sent the photo, I was being bombarded with social media videos and news stories about Ioniq 5’s being written off because of seemingly minor battery damage. Google knows everything. So, we decided to send the car to Hyundai to get sign off on the battery before having the insurance company spend a pile of money on collision repairs.

We were pretty confident the battery was fine. We had driven without incident for 50 days and more than 8,000 km from J.T. Cheeseman to Midland Ontario, the location of the accident. In fact, we had completely forgotten about those scrapes. But when Hyundai got the car on a hoist and attached their computers, they got “a few battery error codes”. Oh boy…

Because of the social media furore, Hyundai Canada is taking battery issues very seriously. In fact, they sent an engineer to the dealership to look at our vehicle plus a few others with battery issues.

Thankfully, the codes were determined to be caused by a known issue with the battery control module. The module was replaced on warranty, and the battery was declared to be fine.

Oh, and the sheared bolt pictured above was actually one of 36 aluminum bolts that hold the battery cover on, as opposed to the steel bolts that hold the battery onto the frame. Hyundai Canada asked the dealership to remove cover for inspection, and in doing so another 14 of them got twisted off! Some poor mechanic is having to drill them all out, probably as I write this.

So there it is. The cover should be back on and the car delivered to Kirmac any day. Because it has taken so long, Hyundai is picking up the towing cost. Most, but not all, of the parts are in, so collision repairs can start as soon as the car is delivered. And the longer it all takes, the less we’ll have to pay to store it until we return from our next trip – we can’t have it parked at our place because we’ve leased the house out for the next 8 months. You need to travel while you still can, so we are going for it!