I will try to make this long story short, please bear with me. This is about my 2017 Elantra SE 2.0 liter model.

Hit a deer July 6th, after that car still ran fine no issues, just a bunch of damage to the left front/side. Body shop finally had an opening Aug 2. Got the car back Aug 19, looked great. Drove home, noticed headlight indicator on dash, then when I got home saw that the headlight didn't work ( it had been smashed in the accident and was replaced.) So called them, it was Friday afternoon, said I'd bring it back next week. I live in a rural area and the body shop is in the city 45 miles away.

I don't drive every day I work from home so didn't drive it all and about 5 days later I went to take the car down to the city and the battery was dead. Got it jumped, went down, they said it was a loose connector on the new headlight, everything was good now. Ran some errands, stopped /started, went home.Again, no driving till a week later go to take it out and again the battery is dead. Jump it, run errands, call the guys. They give me a story about how the battery is old, things happen, yada yada. This ticks me off. It's dead again next morning. I parked at 6:30pm, by 11:30 am it had power but not enough to start the car. I call again and demand some better answers/action. The guy says he'll look into it, then emails me a service bulletin 18-EE-002, Midtronics GR8 Battery Analyzer software update. No idea what this has to do with the problem I have, but I am like most people, a driver not a car mechanic.

So what do I do now? Why is this battery draining all the time? Should I replace the battery? I hate the idea that I already spent money on the bodywork and now I have to spend more money/time to try to run this down because they seemingly won't take any responsibility for the issue. I brought them a car that ran and got back one that didn't.

Ok thanks for bearing with the long story, any input welcomed and appreciated.

 

You don't have to be a car mechanic to do some things to help yourself, especially the distance from available service.

Some of the things that can cause a battery to run down;
A light left on somewhere
if your vehicle has a rear wiper, if for some reason it can't get to the park position , will keep attempting and drain the battery
There are several modules in your vehicle that compose a network. It takes approx 45 minutes for all modules to shut down, which if one doesn't go into sleep mode , will drain the battery.
If your vehicle has the original battery in it , it could be time to replace it.

Until you find the problem , there is one thing you can do to prevent getting stranded and that is to remove the battery negative cable when ready to park it , then reinstall the cable when ready to start and that should allow you to at least get the engine started. There are some negatives when we do this like losing radio station settings , clock etc. but still beats having a dead battery when you need to go somewhere.