It’s unfortunate, but one of the realities of car ownership is that eventually, things break. And while most repairs are only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, sometimes, the bill is more than the cost of buying a new car. For example, there’s the Mercedes-Benz R63 AMG that infamously led to one owner getting a quote for more than $50,000 to fix his engine. But surely a Hyundai can’t be anywhere near that expensive to keep on the road, right? Well, as it turns out, it depends on the Hyundai.
The Drive reports that according to Germany’s AutoBild, a man named Till Westberg was recently quoted an eye-watering amount to repair his Hyundai ix35, which you might know better as the Tucson. But it isn’t just any Hyundai Tucson, and it doesn’t need a regular repair. It’s one of the few Tucsons ever sold that has a hydrogen fuel-cell powertrain.
After buying the car for the equivalent of about $50,000 seven years ago, Westberg reportedly put more than 52,000 miles on the car. And then it just stopped working. As it turned out, the fuel cell system needed to be fixed, and it was no longer under warranty, so Westberg was on the hook for the cost of the entire repair. A repair that would reportedly a whopping $113,000. And no matter how much you love your Hyundai, there’s no way it’s worth spending six figures to keep it on the road.
In a statement given to AutoBild, Hyundai basically said that since it only ever sold about 1,000 hydrogen-powered ix35s, the cost of repairing them is going to be prohibitively expensive. But it’s not just that they were built in small numbers. Hydrogen fuel cell technology has also advanced so quickly that even though the powertrain was introduced back in 2013, it’s already outdated.
That said, Westberg may not be completely out of luck. Even though he obviously has no intention of spending Porsche 911 Carrera money to fix his car, “Hyundai is pursuing whether it can accommodate him with an alternative solution.” We’d like to think that means either a free or heavily discounted Nexo, but it’s possible that he may end up working out a different deal with Hyundai. Either way, we’d like to think the Korean automaker sees the value in helping out one of the earliest adopters of one of its alternative fuel powertrains.