I purchased a new Genesis Coupe 3.8GT in March 2009. The quality was lacking in a few places (steering wheel material must have been mummified leather, trunk lining was a molded paper insert with an exposed speaker hanging down) but overall I liked the car's styling, performance, and technology.
In August of last year, I traded the car in for 2 main reasons:
1) The ride-quality on the GT was simply god-awful (perhaps the standard suspension is more forgiving). I'm sure that if I had kept the car for years I would have developed back problems from being bounced and jarred so much! To be fair, some of the blame lies with the poor quality of our roads, which are in the worst condition they've seen in a decade or more. At highway speed, not only would rough road jar you, but sometimes it would also bounce/drag the car in one direction or another, making it feel unstable. I did not purchase a car of this type to be forced into driving 80-90km/h on a 100km/h highway just to feel safe! I used to joke that Hyundai's "GT-tuned" suspension was made of lumber.
2) The second, more complicated reason why I would not recommend this car is the ineptitude (bordering on negligence) of Hyundai's service techs (at least in my area). A few months after I bought the car, it developed a problem with the climate control where the air flow would shut off almost completely but the fan motor would still run, change speed, etc. The only way to correct it was to turn the temperature all the way to MAX, which was fine if you wanted hot air, but the problem would eventually return if you turned the temp down to a more reasonable level. To complicate matters, this would only occur after several minutes of highway driving, not immediately after startup. After much fretting I finally got the problem to occur near a Hyundai dealership, so I pulled in, left the car running, and dragged one of their service guys out to look at it. I told him what the problem was, demonstrated that the climate control was not moving air like it should, even let HIM adjust it himself to further illustrate the problem. He said "Yeah, there's definitely something wrong there." and told me they couldn't check it today and to book an appointment. I did as he instructed, but I was not local and would only be returning in several weeks. Later, when I picked the car up (after leaving it with them for FOUR days plus a weekend) I was told that nothing was wrong with my car. In the intervening week or so they had forgotten all about my problem. The tech who had actually SEEN the problem occurring was there but had offered no input. They had basically started from scratch and I wasted my time showing them the problem WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING.
I came away from the experience with the following summary: If a problem is not well-documented by Hyundai, totally obvious during visual inspection, or identified by their diagnostic computer, they will not even TRY to solve it! I though they would at least test out the symptoms and repeatable conditions I laid out. Nope. I though they would reason it out something like "Okay, if part A isn't working that could be caused by condition X, Y, or Z". Nope.
Long story short; If everything goes well with your vehicle and all you need are oil changes and regular maintenance services, Hyundai is great. Their people were friendly, their paperwork was thorough, and their prices were fair. But heaven help you if you encounter an undocumented problem.
3) I also had a problem where the USB input occasionally wouldn't play music from my flash drive, only read NO SONG on the display. However, that PALES in comparison to the first two issues!
