Hyundai will finally match its corporate cousin Kia with a seven-year warranty in Australia, but there are a few caveats.
The existing five-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty will remain the Korean brand’s standard aftersales offering, with the extra two years of coverage only applicable to owners who complete scheduled servicing on time within Hyundai’s network.
The longer warranty will come into effect from September 1, 2025, but all vehicles delivered and registered after June 1, 2025 will be eligible for seven years of coverage.
Corrosion, paint and infotainment systems are included in this warranty, while high-voltage batteries (if applicable) continue to be covered by Hyundai’s existing eight-year, 160,000km warranty.
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The inclusion of paint within the standard vehicle warranty is an improvement over the previous offering, in which this was covered only for three years or 100,000km.
The extended coverage covers only privately registered vehicles, and excludes any passenger car used for rideshare, business or rental purposes.
Perhaps given its high percentage of fleet sales, the Staria Load van is also excluded from the seven-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty offer.
The delivery van sticks with a five-year, 160,000km warranty, as do Staria people movers used for commercial purposes; passenger vehicles used for commercial purposes have a five-year, 130,000km warranty.
Despite this, the Staria Load has come in for a $250 price increase, as has almost the entirety of Hyundai’s combustion-powered and hybrid lineup.
The i20 N and i30 Hatch N are up by $2000, and the i30 Sedan N is up by $1000, but all electric models plus the outgoing Palisade avoids any price increases.
Hyundai says these greater price increases for its hot N cars are attributable not only to the change in warranty coverage, but also to other factors like the federal government’s New Vehicle Efficiency Standard (NVES).
Hyundai was the first auto brand to offer a five-year warranty in Australia, moving from three-year coverage all the way back in 1999.
It subsequently moved from a 130,000km limit to unlimited kilometres in 2007.
Its sister brand Kia launched a seven-year, unlimited-kilometre warranty as standard in 2014, spurring others like MG and SsangYong (now KGM) to eventually follow suit.
Now, the new frontier is a 10-year warranty, which has been introduced by MG, Mitsubishi and Nissan over the past year or so, although as with Hyundai all of them are conditional on servicing at official workshops.
Hyundai, therefore, has gone from a warranty pioneer to almost a laggard, particularly given that a five-year warranty is now the expectation even for luxury brands.
It’s far from alone among mass-market auto brands in offering a five-year, unlimited-kilometre standard warranty, however. Others include Ford, Mazda, Subaru, Suzuki, Toyota and Volkswagen.
In the US, where most major auto brands including Toyota, Ford, Chevrolet and Nissan offer only a three-year/36,000-mile standard new-vehicle warranty and a five-year/60,000-mile powertrain warranty, Hyundai and Kia have long offered a five-year/60,000-mile standard warranty and a 10-year/100,000-mile powertrain warranty – since 1999 and 2008 respectively.
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