Quiet.

This group certainly has been quiet lately and the apparent loss of
hyundaitech probably hasn't helped. Are people just not buying
Hyundai's anymore? Or are they now so trouble-free that nobody posts
here? Or has everyone just abandoned usenet for the latest fads such as
Facebook, Twitter, and non-usenet internet forums?

Inquiring minds want to know!

 

I as thinking the same thing the past few days. I guess they are reliable
cars that just don't need much fixing. Hyundaitech's name has come up and
has not been heard from so he may be gone, sadly. He was a great asset.

I just passed 9000 miles on my new Sonata. Perfect so far. While much the
same as my '07, the minor improvements are nice to have.

USENET has take some heavy usage hits since many ISPs dropped them. The good
news is, a lot of twits went with them, the bad news is, many of the
genuine interesting and knowledgeable people have been lost too. Ther eare
free and low cost newsgroup servers avialable though. You just have to sign
up and put in the settings.

 

Looking at headers, hyundaitech was using Easynews. That's a premium
service. Hope he's OK, he's been a GIANT help in this group.

 

I think that this will be a very good year for Hyundai - the public
consciousness of Hyundai will reach a critical mass and people will all
of a sudden think of that brand for a car purchase. That's my gut
feeling at least.

 

My new 2010 V6 Sonata just crossed 5,000 miles without a single hiccup.
And I am getting about 22 MPG average...about 1.5 better than my '06
finished out.

And I am on Facebook about 14 hours a day (not constantly mind you). I am
on Twitter too, but I pretty much dislike it. I do follow one guy from
Hyundai...a PR person.

I still try to read here every day.

Eric

 

Usenet audience is certainly shrinking. Alas. Lots of people are too
clueless to know anything beyond what their browsers display. Google
totally fuscking up Usenet access through its own interface didn't
help either.

Anyhow, I just bought Sonata GLS 2010. My first ever Hyundai.
(We used to be 100% Subaru family for some 20 years).
Got it for $16,584 out of the door. Probably could have knocked
another $200-$400 off but didn't have the guts risking it because
at 16.6K it's already a sweet deal. Will be asking questions here
regularly. Like:

1. What's the consensus on proper break-in for the 2.4L engine?
Anything in particular to pay attention to?
2. If I were to use synthetic oil with extended oil changing intervals,
will it invalidate warranty?
3. What is owners' general experience with the manufacturer
standing by its products? E.g., with Subaru, whenever one has
any outstanding issues with the dealer, the most efficient way
of solving it is to complaint to SoA directly. Under the pressue from
Subaru, even the worst dealers become the sweetest bunch.
Does this work the same way with Hyundai?

The http://www.hmaservice.com/ web site is awesome! So much
great specialized information available for free! For most of
these (say, service manuals) Subaru wants owners to pay extra $$.
I already downloaded and converted to PDFs the entire workshop
manual. Incredible.

DK

 

I'm getting about 1.5 better than my 07 too, but I average closer to 26 mpg
overall. Probably more highway miles than you.

 

Follow the owner's manual. Just take it easy for the first few hundred
miles.

I don't know. The only advantage of synthetics is the longer intervals
between changes. Other than that, you really don't need it. Synthetic oil
is better than regular dino oils. With proper care, however, a typical
engine today will outlast the rest of the car. Some high performance cars,
like the Corvette, come from the factory with synthetics. Some Corvettes
are driven like they were designed to handle, but most are driven by 50+
year olds that can finally afford one and never go above 3000 rpm.

Can't answer that one either. I've never had a problem with the car. My
only visits to the dealer wre the occasional oil change. His price is very
competitive for that, over priced for other services.

Yep

 

I was a fan of GM cars all my life (16 of them) with a sprinkling of maybe
five cars that were not. Then my latest GM car was great for the first two
years and started to deteriorate. With no help from GM with some issues, I
started to look at other brands.

Years ago, I used to laugh at people buying Hyundai. Just look at a three
year old Excel and you'd understand. Then they started to improve. Then
they built a new plant in the US and started to build the Sonata, a fine
looking car. Talking with a couple of people (whose opinion on cars I
respect) they told me how good the rentals they had were. That got me
interested.

I was thinking of a Lucerne or an Avalon. I looked at a Sonata Limited and
it had every option and feature of those cars, but was priced thousands of
dollars less. Having just paid $800 for repairs on the Buick and two trips
coming up in a few weeks, I made the deal. It was a great value. One of
the considerations early on was resale value as Hyundai was not as good as
some others, but trading it in 38 months later on a new Sonata, that was not
a detriment at all.

 

I already downloaded and converted to PDFs the entire workshop
manual. Incredible.

Could you share with the group the process that you did this with?

 

I told my wife I'd get her a family sedan but I got more than I was
looking for. It's very nicely put together, with a whole lot of room,
way more power underfoot than I should be allowed, and a great number of
safety features - with a warranty to boot - what a deal!

My guess is that you went from a 6 to a 4 cylinder engine. How's that
working out?

 

Still a 6. Great power, I just wish I had a place to go fast. I've not
gone above 110 yet. The 2011 is only available with a 4 cylinder, but
eventually will get a turbo.

 

Actually, there are many other advantages, some of which may or may not
be useful to any particular person. The cold cranking is much better
with synthetics and that is the primary reason I use them. They are
also much better at the high temp end as well. If I lived in TX or AZ I
would probably use synthetic oil for that reason.

I still change at either 5 or 10 K miles depending on the age of the
vehicle. Above 100K miles I start changing every 10K miles.

Matt

 

Sure, no problem.

1. Go to hmaservice.com and register with valid email. You'll
get the password by email.

2. Click on "Shop", then select Model (Sonata(NF) in my case),
year (2010), and engine (G 2.4 DOHC). This gives you a single
entry on a left pane, which, when clicked on, expands to a bunch
of items with a printer icon next to each ("Fuel System",
"Brake System", etc).

3. From there, simply clicking on a printer icon runs a script that
loads the entire chapter and opens up Print window (at least
on WinXP here). In theory, at this point all one needs to do is
to print to a virtual PDF printer. It really SHOULD be a breeze
but I did run into quite a lot of issues. Hate to make it sound
complicated and hope that it is easier for others, but this is how
it worked for me:

4. Firefox 3.6 printing to PDF produces gibberish (a known bug).
If one uses print to PDF, another browser should be used. I ended
up using IE8 for everything. IE6 chocked on printing these large
documents.

5. Even with that, my printing directy to PDF produced very
inferior results - output graphics quality was invariably
VERY poor. Tried turning off lossy compression, downsampling,
etc, etc - nothing worked. This is with "PDF maker" installed by
either Acrobat 5.0.5 or Acrobat Pro 9.0.2 (tried on two computers;
note that these are "writer" versions, not the usual Acrobat
reader).

6. So, ended up printing to "Microsoft XPS Document Writer"
(it's one of these things MS pushes on you; I think this one
was installed along with the .NET crapola). In the output *.XPS
files, the graphics quality was as in original. So now I had
local copies of everything but I wanted a conveneince of having
PDFs because, say, my Kindle reader can't read XPS. IE can
open output XPS files and print them. So, once again, all
you need is PDF printer and find options that convert properly.

7. There are TONS of various solutions around. Google it.
Tons of freeware, too (e.g. GhostScript). I stuck to the
Adobe Acrobat 9 that I already had. Preserving graphics
quality still proved difficult though. Can't say that
all of the things I ended up changing were necessary but
that's what worked for me:

- In IE8/Tools/Internet Options/Advanced/Multimedia,
turn OFF "Automatic Image resizing" and "Smart Image Dithering"
- In IE8/Tools/Internet Options/Advanced/Printing, turn
ON "Print Background Colors and Images".
- In "Adobe PDF" printer's Printing Preferences, turn OFF
"rely On System Fonts Only...".
- In "Adobe PDF" printer's Printing Preferences/Default Settings,
edit them to change to:
1200 dpi resolution;
No downsampling of images and only ZIP compression
for all types of images
Color Management OFF
This process gave me local PDF files that look as good as
what one sees online. The only annoyance is the web page
address and date that browsers add to every page when
printing - but it's really not a big deal. The end result
is 17 PDF files totalling 83 Mb. The biggest file is
Body Electrical System with 211 pages in total.

8. Another thing that can be tried is to install Adobe's
default Postscript Printer driver and print to postscript
file. Some of the 200 pages files ended up being around
1.5Gb! They would shrink upon compression to PDF but
Adobe's own Distiller then chocked on large ones (but
converted smaller ones well with the "eBook" settings).
Perhaps GhostScript is more robust at converting *.PS
into *.PDF (that was my experience from the past but I
haven't tried it this time around).

9. Exactly the same procedure can be used to save all
of the DTC info. Except, alas, with the way this part
is scripted on the web page, one can only print individual
pages at a time, so every single code ends up being in
several separate files. Too tedious and too much work.

DK

 

Nope, still here. Some folks lost Usenet from the ISP so that might be
why.

- Thee Chicago Wolf [MVP]

 

We're going to test-drive the 2011 Sonata sometime this week. My wife is
looking to get a newer sedan and downstream her 2006 Accord. We've test
driven every thing from a Mercedes E350 down to a Subaru Legacy. There
seemed to be issues with most of them for various reasons, a lot of them
being visibility, as she is height challenged (4' 10") and the style of most
sedans today is to make the back window start pretty high up.

I talked her into trying the Sonata based on my success with my Santa Fe. I
really love the styling and wanted to give it a fair shot. Right now the
closest thing we have found that would be acceptable to buy is the Audi A4,
which makes you buy the most prestigious (read 'expensive') version to get
the features we value most.

Jon

 

Thanks for this info. I've used HMASERVICE for years but but never thought
of keeping the info local.. Got to admit its a lot easier to look up info in
a folder.
I used PDF995 which installs with TAXCUT/HRBLOCK and IE7.
Only problem I had was somewhere in the process it became necessary to push
each documents by creating the next one. Naming the docs became confusing,
but I worked thru it.

 

Let us know how it goes. I have seen the new style Sonata, but I
haven't sat in one yet. The visibility looks to be much worse than the
prior body style as my 2006 has, but the proof is in the pudding as they
say.

Matt

 

Yup. Right now I am about 75% city driving.

 

I saw where Valvoline is offering an up to 300,000 mile guaranty on engines
if you use their oil. Below are some of the requirements. I guess it can
be a good deal if you already change frequently and plan to keep your car
for a long time. 75 changes using synthetic oil can be rather pricey
though, a local dealer charges $59 per change. That would be about $4500
over the life of the car.


150,000 Miles: To be eligible, Covered Consumers must change engine oil and
filter before every 4,000 miles continuously and exclusively using Valvoline
Premium Conventional Motor Oil (or a Valvoline oil listed below in a higher
level of protection).

225,000 Miles: To be eligible, Covered Consumer must change engine oil and
filter before every 4,000 miles continuously and exclusively using either
Valvoline MaxLife Motor Oil or Valvoline DuraBlend Motor Oil (or a Valvoline
oil listed below in a higher level of protection).

300,000 Miles: To be eligible, Covered Consumers must change engine oil and
filter before every 4,000 miles continuously and exclusively using Valvoline
SynPower Full Synthetic Motor Oil or Valvoline MaxLife Full Synthetic Motor
Oil.