Steering power hose rusty?

Hi all,

I have a 2001 Elantra VE and only 39,300km now. Last week I had to
have the car towed to the dealer since all the steering power fluid
was gone in one day (I can tell it from my garage). They told me the
hose was rusty, so caused the leaking. I know nothing about the car
but I did every maintenance they recommended over years. Just a week
before the incident, I paid $100 for a maintenance (they called serive
package#3) to check many stuff.

Now the replacement of the hose costed me $400. My husband planed to
buy a SantaFe in a couple of months later and now he doubted the
quality of parts of Hyundai.

We are living in Canada (west of Ontario) and we do have much snow and
salt on roads. But is it normal that a hose can be rusty to leak after
only 4 years? Dose it mean every 4 years I have to replace the hose?
Any comments are welcome!

Helen

 

I haven't seen this in the U.S. on Elantras, but I have seen it on Sonatas.
It appears that Hyundai puts a rubber sleeve over the parts of the pipe
that could rub things, and on the Sonatas, it sits in a low spot and tends
to collect water and the line rusts. The reason that they wouldn't have
seen it during the routine maintenance is that it's covered by the rubber,
so they won't even know it's rusty unless there is fluid coming out of the
rubber. At least, that'll be the case if it's similar to the Sonata
issue.

To Hyundai's credit, the replacement lines on the Sonatas have a sleeve of
different design that prevents water from entering, so I wouldn't expect
you'd have to continue the process on your car. I don't view this as a
product quality issue so much as a design flaw which was later corrected.


As for the Santa Fe, I think the 2.7V6 is very reliable. The 2.4 seems to
have significantly more problems, and the 3.5 is too new to draw many
conclusions, but based on the problem frequency with the XG, I'd expect
the 3.5 to be less reliable than the 2.7.

 

There's more than one power steering hose/pipe. What's the part number
of the hose that got replaced? It shoud be on the copy of the repair
order you received.