2002 Hyundai Accent Pricing and Specs

At more than 10 years old, your car is well and truly out of warranty, even though it hasn’t covered a huge distance. You could certainly contact Hyundai Australia’s customer service department and ask the question. In my experience, Hyundai has taken its customer complaints very seriously and has a good track record of putting things right.

Most of this series of Hyundai Accents had a conventional automatic transmission which seems pretty good on the reliability front. But if your car is a Series 2 Accent, then it might be fitted with the company’s CVT transmission. These have been known to give trouble due to input shaft failures, and this could certainly cause the death rattle you’re hearing. Again, though, you’re a long way out of the five-year warranty your car was sold new with.

This is not an unknown problem with this make and model. Sometimes the stereo system will start by losing sound on the FM radio, then progress through to the CD player and even the Bluetooth system. Eventually, you won’t be able to get any noise out of the unit at all. Apparently, it’s a glitch in the unit’s electronics and cant’ be fixed via a reset.

The advice is not to buy a second-hand unit from a wrecked car, as the same problem is likely to occur down the track. The good news is that there are companies in Australia that have developed a fix for this and can return your stereo to full working order. You can find them online.

The other solution would be to ditch the original stereo and fit something new with better quality sound and maybe even features like an integrated reversing camera.

Car makers will sometimes help out with such problems provided the car has been serviced correctly and not abused throughout its life. I agree that 40,000km is not a reasonable expectation for a modern automatic transmission, so I’d be contacting Hyundai Australia’s customer service division to see if anything can be done. Experience tells me that Hyundai takes its obligations in this area pretty seriously, so you may be offered some help with the cost of repairs.

You could also have the transmission inspected to see what went wrong (your state motoring club is a good place to start for independent inspections like this one) as this information might be very useful if you decide to take the matter further. The ACCC would be the final step in this process, and Australian Consumer Law deals with what is fit for purpose and what is not.