Elantra GD (2013+) :: RPMs Too High - Cannot Shift Into 1st Gear

Purchased my 2013 Elantra GT a few months ago and have been having a problem that had stumped everyone at the dealership. Thought I'd see who else is having it and what the thoughts are. To start, this is a 6SPD Manual Transmission.

Problem: Say you're at a stop and begin accelerating in 1st gear and then shift into neutral because you have to come to a stop again. When operating normally, the RPMs immediately wind down to idle. Well for me, about 15% of the time or more, the RPMs will take up to 10-15 seconds to wind down to idle. During this time, you cannot really shift into 1st gear because the RPM are too high.

The dealership has been working on this issue since last month. They replaced some parts and it is still doing it. They got diagnostic data and told me the throttle was sticking. No one could figure it out. Engineers got involved from regional, and it got pretty heavy as far as time. After several attempts at figuring out the problem and replacing things (which didn't resolve the issue), the engineers drove another new GT and found it was also doing it. So all of a sudden they said "it's normal" and closed the case.

Chances are, if other new ones are doing it, so is yours. I got second opinions from other auto shops who said it is not at all normal and that there may be a defect in the design. I've owned 4 Manual Transmission cars and I have never seen this before. If you're curious and have the 6spd manual version of this car, the easiest and quickest way to see this happen is accelerate in 1st gear to about 4000RPM and shift into neutral. Eventually, it'll get stuck and take a significantly longer time for the RPMs to return to idle. Usually when it finally happens, it'll keep doing it for several subsequent acceleration cycles.