Warning lights on my Hyundai Elantra flashed & the car failed to start

The sedan is a 2016 model & has been well maintained. It has clocked 57,000 km on the odo.

BHPian Mahesh Babu recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

My ownership story of 2016 Elantra 2.0 SX (O) AT has been "Fill it, shut it, forget it" so far except for an unforced error on my part while my buddy was less than a month old.

Apparently, a lamp post right across my quarters has been holding a grudge against me (or my cars) for the past 22 years and refused to budge when I reversed my car onto it at 3.00 AM on a rainy night, ultimately forcing me to part with my NCB, anyway that is an old story.

Apart from routine service and oil changes my only expense was battery replacement at about 30 months which failed after giving sufficient warnings in the form of reluctant starts, in the sense that it took two or three attempts which was in stark contrast to normal when it fires up at the very first attempt every time. I decided to check the battery which was reported faulty and was replaced before it totally gave up.

But today morning when I tried to start my car, it was just a flurry of lights in the MID followed by a blinking seat belt warning and an electronic tik, tik, tik... starter was not working. Sometimes it refused to even detect the key. The car has been perfectly fine till the previous day and I was planning to keep this 'no-nonsense" car for around 10 years.

I believe in the motto "Drive with empathy" even before I came across the Team-BHP thread with the same advice (my 2010 Cruze was sold with stock clutch plates after clocking more than 1,50,000 km).

This car is also entirely self-driven and with my limited and careful use (57K on Odo, still on original brake pads and Hankook tyres - which I am planning to replace soon despite having a fair amount of tread left, considering its age and enticed by great reviews of Michelin P4ST in the forum), with a dose of TLC, it seemed a practical proposition till yesterday.

The only concern was the limited number of cars on the road, compounded by the discontinuation by Hyundai which means spare parts might prove difficult to procure when needed. My extended warranty is already over and I was worried something was seriously amiss. Please have a look at these short videos (clip 1 & clip 1) which I managed to record and share with my ASS.

They suspected a battery problem and advised me to try and jumpstart the vehicle which frankly speaking failed to impress me. My kinship with cars spans over near four decades and am nearing seven digits on odo readings, and I thought I understood my machines - a dying battery never behaved like this in my experience.

However, I decided to follow professional advice and to my surprise, it proved right. Retrospectively I remember having read a similar opinion regarding faulty battery as a cause of unexplained funnily behaving MID signals in modern cars. The battery dealer was for a trial of charging the present battery, however, I chose peace of mind and got a new one taking advantage of a 40% pro-rata warranty since the present battery is already nearing the life span of its predecessor.

I decided to share the experience in the forum because I found it quite surprising and it may benefit someone facing a similar issue in future.

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