Check your front cat. On the way home from the beach last week we eneded up breaking down on the way home. Before we actually gave in and called AAA, the symptoms we were having was it barely ran, took forever for it to accelerate and it was eating gas like it was it's last meal. The more we drove it, the slower it went. I thought once we hit the interstate it would clear up, but it didn't, it got worse. I stopped off at a few gas stations to check things out and couldn't find anything. A few things I did notice was the intake was extremely loud (we also have an aftermarket air filter on it, but was louder than normal) and everything under hood was very very hot. Make a short story short, we got the car towed home after having AAA looking at it. They said the front cat was shot. Well, after getting it home, I somehow got the front cat off of our '02 santa fe without breaking any bolts either, w00t w00t, and as I was dropping the cat, a part of it fell out. Sure enough, it was toast. I took some pictures if I can post and if anyone wants to see. Still searching online to find a new one though. Hope your sitting down if you call a dealer to have them fix it if thats the prob, its not cheap. So, to sum this up, is it hot under the hood and how bad does it run? One check to do if its the cat is check the tail pipe. Have someone rev the car up in neutral while your at the tailpipe, if hardly anything comes out, its more than likely the cat. Hope this helps.

 

Good point about the cat. We just had another guy with a 2.4 L Santa Fe and the CAT was gone. He burned up his motor pretty good going up and down a lot of hills.

 

Yea we were told if we were to keep driving it we would blow our motor. We got lucky I would say. I got the cat off and fired it up with an open manifold. Sounded pretty cool, and it revved up great, much better than with the cat. Thankfully we didn't blow up anything....that we know of yet. Give me some time and i'll get the pictures up of what our cat looks like.

 

It still runs like crap now a new problem has developed. It seems that if you rev the engine it hesitates then the rpms stay up longer than normal like about 2 seconds. I was going to pull out across traffic today and the engine hesitated so I decided not to but when I let off the gas pedal it kept accelerating for a bout 2 seconds and pulled me out into traffic even though I had the brake on it kept pulling . A woman almost t boned me then she flipped me off. Luckily the was no accident. I'm still not getting any codes..AAAARRRGH!

 

Did you ever check/replace the TPS I suggested 3 months ago?

 

Make sure the timing belt was done right, it's relatively easy to verify. Remove the top cover, and verify that they got the sprockets lined up ok, and that the belt is tight. I've seen some horrible timing belt work in my day, the kind that makes you wonder how it still ran.

 

Check your cats and resonator! Like I said in one of my last posts, the front cat was broken up. Pulled it off and found the honeycomb on the inside was broken in half. Ended up punching the cat out and putting it back on, only to find out the problem was still happening. The car barley ran, had no acceleration and the intake was louder than normal even with a punched out front cat. So I ended up unhooking the rest of the exhaust from the bottom of the from cat back was unhooked. Used a wire coat hanger to hold it up and drove the car into town to a local exhaust shop. They got the car up on the lift and had them remove the second cat and resonator and put on a "test" pipe. Tada! problem gone! We are running an open exhaust from the front manifold all the way back to the stock muffler, and it runs great. Granted this is only going to be temporary for a bit until we get the money up to replace everything, but I would look at the exhaust.

 

Well it was running badly then it got worse. It threw a some more codes and I had the TPS senser replaced .The part cost 200 hundred dollars. It did not solve my problem. I threw 200 more dollars down the drain for the part. I got fed up with Hyundai and I bought a new Pontiac g5. It is under warranty and I will not have to worry about doing repairs for a while. I will not have to spend countless hours sifting though the HMA service website and trying to determine what they "mean" when they are referring to a component by several different names, and information that is supposed to pertain to my model but does not. I really liked the vehicle when it ran good but servicing it is a different story. I'm not sure if I will ever buy another Hyundai again. I feel like a weight has been lifted from me. A 6 month ordeal is over.

 

This is why REAL mechanics test and diagnose problems while amateur hack mechanics just throw parts at a problem and hope it solves it. Next time go to a real mechanic.

No, you'll just have to worry about what to do with your car when the Pontiac division is gone after 2010 (and if GM will still be here after that).

 

Actually, a REAL mechanic told me not to buy another Hyundai.