Sold a brand new car with a major electrical issue that cannot be diagnosed. What should we do?
Preface that this is in Houston TX. We have been trying to buy a 2026 Hyundai Hybrid Palisade for months. We have test driven several in the past, but never walked away with one for various reasons. We finally came to a dealership that had exactly the one we wanted. This was stupid of us, I understand, but we elected to purchase the car without actually test driving this one. We signed the paperwork and got a brand new pallisade Calligraphy trim. However, as soon as we drove out of the lot, the car had major issues seemingly navigating the gear shifting or between the electrical/gas transmission resulting in lurching with breaking and accelerating. It actually felt pretty unsafe to drive as the braking and accelerating could be quite delayed and severe.
We now had to bring it back to the dealership and its been sitting on the service end running all sorts of diagnostics. We went from being exhilarated at finally buying our car, to immediately heartbroken that it has a problem immediately. The service guys say they couldn't figure out what was going on initially, that they have never seen this before, and that they have to run some kind of patch software from Hyundai. I also have on record the service guy on the phone telling us that this should have been caught during the PDI process prior to sale.
We are now super nervous that we have a brand new car that is starting out with problems right off the lot. I think even if they can identify the issue and fix it, there will always be this uncertainty of whether it will be some lasting problem we are going to be dealing with. We actually are coincidentally dealing with an electrical issue in our older Honda CRV that has taken 4 trips back to the dealership and they still haven't been able to figure out what the problem is.
What action can we take? I am kind of inclined to return the car altogether... We literally had only put like 3 miles on the car driving it around testing it and that peace of mind is completely gone now.