We recently bought a 3-year old i20 from a Hyundai dealer and it came without a manual, except for the audio-visual system. I tried to find one online and found many PDFs, but the production standard was so bad I couldn’t use them. I asked our dealer if I could buy a copy and they said that Hyundai didn’t produce printed copies any more.
So I had to buy one off eBay and that’s slightly more usable even though it’s produced from a PDF. But considering the care that’s gone into the production of the cars, why are the manuals so shoddy?
Here are some examples.
1. The front page says “Owner’s Manual” but doesn’t identify the model or even the make of car. (I can’t even see a mention of the word i20 anywhere.)
2. The table of contents is distributed through the manual making it difficult to use. In many of the PDFs I downloaded the chapter numbering doesn’t even correspond to the actual chapters.
3. There is no index, despite it being in the main table of contents.
4. The illustrations, particularly those showing instrument layouts, are so small and indistinct as to be almost unusable.
5. There are no electronic links in the PDF versions.
6. I don’t have any document that tells me the options my car has and it’s often tricky to know which of the many variants is appropriate to my car.
7. The variants at any one stage are often listed one after another without any key which ties them together so that one gets lost.
Now I realise that cars are made from a large number of parts and many of the parts are used in multiple models. So doubtless the writers want to describe each part once (for each language) and then stitch together a manual from all the appropriate parts. But then why don’t they do the job properly and (a) provide a different manual for each variant of each model and language and (b) include the appropriate text that identifies the variant in the appropriate place? The technology is comparatively simple to generate these on demand (including indexing) if the number is too large to keep in stock.
