2:05AM EST November 4. 2012 - Updated: 1:59 a.m. Sunday with Hyundai's response.
It's shocking enough to have sold 900,000 vehicles with inflated gas-mileage ratings, but Hyundai and Kia amp up the hubris by refusing to properly inform owners about the mistake on their consumer website home pages.
Neither explicitly say that they are reducing the gas-mileage ratings on a third of the new vehicles sold over the past three years. Not do they let owners, both past and present, know they can apply for compensation. You have to go deeper into the site to figure that out.
Hyundai, in a burst of hubris, deals with the issue by portraying itself as a consumer champion on its home page -- even though the reduction resulted from an Environmental Protection Agency investigation. "Hyundai owners, we've got your back" reads the tab on the site that takes owners to the page disclosing the embarrassment. "More information on Adjusted Fuel Economy Ratings," reads the smaller headline. Adjusted? They were reduced.
We reached out to Hyundai spokesman Jim Trainor about the approach. "I don't think we've ever tried to 'characterize' this as anything other than admitting our mistake and helping our owners understand it and work through it. 'We've got your back' can just as easily mean 'we'll fix our mistakes' as anything else, especially when they impact you," he says.
Yet it doesn't say "We'll fix our mistakes" or even more explicitly: "We've lowered our gas mileage ratings and owners can apply for compensation by clicking here."
Kia, the Hyundai corporate cousin, cuts out the editorial comment on its home page, but also refuses to explicitly tell its owners in the tab that it made a mistake and is going offer them money to compensate. Its home-page tab flatly says only "Information on Kia MPG Ratings." Owners that haven't heard of the oversight otherwise would never think to click on it. Then it tells you it's taking you to a "third-party site" and that "Kia is not responsible for the accuracy or timeliness of the information provided." We couldn't get the "third party" site to load, but Kia provided us with their link to their rating reduction page.
Drive On readers have known about suspicions of inflated Hyundai gas-mileage ratings for more than a year. Tech writer Jefferson Graham noted the discrepancies in his own Hyundai Elantra -- and made a video about it. After that report, Hyundai borrowed his car for a few days for testing and said it couldn't find anything wrong.
Even in the depths of its unintended-acceleration travails a couple years ago, Toyota was never accused of soft-peddling news of successive recalls on its website home page. Yes, it was embarrassing. But it was made clear to owners or prospective buyers every time that there was a safety recall that could affect hundreds of thousands of owners.
This week, car shoppers who look at Kia's or Hyundai's home page may not realize that the cars they are going to take a look at, the ones that got up to 40 miles a gallon on the highway, no longer do. They are not being explicitly informed. Hyundai and Kia are only compounding their troubles by not taking the embarrassment on the chin on their home pages and not being straight with consumers.
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After our post, Hyundai's Trainor sent the following:
"I don't see how you can possibly be critical of our efforts in informing customers of the relabeling issue.
We (Hyundai and Kia) set up dedicated websites for our customers to make this easy, answer their questions, and give them an immediate estimation of their reimbursement. Customers, and others, get information on the consumer homepage and it's the top story on the media site. We held a news conference. We sent a news release. We Tweeted for all the world to see.
"We tweeted a link for President (John) Krafcik's media briefing. We posted this immediately on our popular Facebook site. We have hired social media experts to work alongside our experts who are answering questions that have been coming in. We are posting on our social sites on a regular basis for our customers. We hired extra people to help with the increased call levels at our customer connect center. We held special web meetings with our dealers so they could best communicate with customers. We are sending letters to all affected customers. We are taking out full-page ads in some 30 Sunday papers. We spent all day yesterday talking to media so their stories would be complete and accurate, thus informative to their readers and viewers. And I'm sure I'm missing other actions.
"Your story was ill-tempered, wrong, misleading and unfair. I respectfully ask that you remove it, and consider posting this note so readers who saw the original post can be properly informed."
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