- Hyundai is recalling thousands of Santa Fe crossovers over a fire risk.
- The vehicles may have an exposed terminal, which can cause a short.
- This can lead to a fire following a crash, but the issue appears rare.
Fire-related recalls seem increasingly common and we can add one more to the list. It involves 135,386 Hyundai Santa Fe crossovers from the 2024 and 2025 model years.
The vehicles may have a starter harness boot cover that isn’t fully seated over the starter motor’s “B+” terminal. This means that in “certain crash scenarios involving varying degrees of engine compartment deformation,” the exposed terminal could come into contact with the cooling fan assembly.
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This can result in an electrical short, which increases the risk of a fire. This is particularly dangerous as the vehicle has already been in an accident and could potentially be leaking fuel.
The issue was discovered last year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration following a New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) front barrier crash test with a 2024 Santa Fe. During an inspection, smoke was detected coming from the engine compartment.
Hyundai spent months investigating and trying to replicate the issue, eventually finding “a number” of vehicles with poorly fitted starter motor terminal covers. This led to a factory inspection, but this didn’t find any issues and testing showed that a correctly installed terminal cover should remain in place over time.
This suggests an exposed terminal is a rare occurrence and it’s believed that only 1% of recalled vehicles have the issue. Given this, it’s not surprising the NHTSA test is the only known incident.
That’s good news, but owners will need to take their vehicle to a dealership so the starter motor terminal cover can be inspected and reinstalled, if necessary.
Notification letters are scheduled to go out in December and the fix should be relatively quick as a dealer notification lists the process as taking less than half an hour.
