An Auckland couple have spent a year without use of their car boot after being told to find the fix themselves.
Darryl Gordon and Caroline Knights told Fair Go their 2015 Hyundai Accent Elite had been running as good as new until it suddenly clamped up.
"It started off with the boot not opening," explained Gordon.
"Push the button a couple of times and it would open and close intermittently, and then it just stopped completely."
This was puzzling because the car was only eight years old, and had had very little use — it had only clocked up around 23,000km.
They took it into an Auckland Hyundai dealership in March 2023 to see what could be done.
The car underwent a series of tests, which were only supposed to take a few hours, but stretched out to three days.
A suspected fault was found with the Body Control Module or "BCM" for short. It controls various electronics in a vehicle — such as power windows, door locking, indicators, and mirrors.
The diagnostics alone cost the couple $530 and, although the dealer found the problem, it didn't have a solution. It had checked with Hyundai and there were no replacement parts.
Gordon said the only advice he was given was to go looking for a second-hand one, but he’d need to find an exact match to the part number belonging to the faulty BCM.
Some companies Gordon spoke to told him they had modules or repaired modules, but not that specific type.
After weeks of fruitless searching, Gordon went directly to Hyundai New Zealand.
"It's their vehicle, their parts, they should know everything on it."
But he says the response was the same: "We don't make it, we don't stock it, we don't keep it, there's nothing else we can do."
Under the Consumer Guarantees Act, manufacturers must take "reasonable" action to ensure parts were available for a "reasonable" period.
Outgoing Consumer NZ head of testing Paul Smith said the term "reasonable" could often be ambiguous but vehicles were different because there was plenty of data on how cars tended to age.
For example, figures from the Ministry of Transport showed the average age of a car on our roads was nearly 15 years old.
“So, I think it's quite reasonable that, if you're a manufacturer selling a car in New Zealand, you should support the car for at least the average period.”
Because it was the manufacturer's responsibility to supply parts, a car owner could go straight to them, rather than through the retailer they bought the car from.
In Darryl and Caroline's case, they bought their Hyundai from another couple in a private sale, so they were not protected by the Consumer Guarantees Act.
But Smith says that shouldn't matter — it all comes back to what was reasonable.
“If you've bought a car that's five or six years old and you've bought it privately, you'd still expect the manufacturer to cover that, even if it's not absolutely laid out in your consumer rights act.”
Gordon said he’d just appreciate some guidance.
“I know it's a boot, but it's a big part of the vehicle. No one's gonna buy it if half the thing doesn't work. A little help would go a long way.”
Fair Go contacted Hyundai New Zealand and laid out the issue. The car-maker wouldn't be interviewed and didn't answer any of Fair Go’s specific questions, but it quickly contacted Darryl and Caroline to put things right.
Hyundai explained BCM modules were made by a third-party manufacturer, and it had stopped making them because there was next-to-no demand.
But it acknowledged it should have looked into the issue further, given the vehicle's age. Hyundai refunded the charge to diagnose the problem, ordered a new module for Darryl and Caroline, and offered to install the new part — free of charge.
Finally in March 2024, a full year since the saga started, the case of the stuck boot is both open – and shut.
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