Why We’ve Finally Lost Faith in Das Auto — An Open Letter to VW

Dear Volkswagen of America,

We have long been VW enthusiasts, and little has dampened our enthusiasm amid a steady stream of disappointing news. Even the drip drip drip of almost daily revelations about the years and years of scheming to evade emissions rules. As three-time VW car owners, we kept up our faith because the cars are distinctive and well designed at a reasonable price.

Until now.

We were very disappointed, although not entirely surprised, to learn last month that VW of America had rejected our request to pay for future repairs to the potentially non-working airbags in our 2008 VW Jetta Wolfsburg edition. With only 60,000 miles on the odometer, and having spent almost $1,000 so far to try to fix the problem but to no avail, we had hoped that VW would step in and pay for any further costs so that our airbag failure dashboard light would turn off and we’d be guaranteed that the airbag would deploy in any accident.

But VW, within about a day of making our request, denied it.

We had hoped that VW would pay for further diagnostic efforts to find the root cause of our airbag dashboard light having been consistently on for many months. We had already paid our dealer to replace the airbag sensor/chip, and the dealer even replaced it one more time on the house, and then we paid the dealer to replace our battery even though we’d replaced it through the dealer a couple of years ago. Next up, the dealer advised us, would be for us to pay several more hundred dollars to replace a door wiring harness to see if that would do the trick.

Giving us some optimism — falsely, it turned out — was that we had a not dissimilar problem with our last VW, a 2001 GTI, which the manufacturer paid to fix at a similar point in the car’s lifespan. That VW paid to fix that issue helped ensure our loyalty so that when it came time to get a new car, we again purchased a Volkswagen.

But as we told the VW of America customer service representative last month and the regional case manager who replied to our inquiry a short time later, we do not plan to ever buy another Volkswagen if the automaker doesn’t get this fixed for us. And we do appreciate that the good folks at Volkswagen Group of America were polite, fully listened to our problems and also acted quickly. It was just that they acted quickly to deny our request.

So as a result, on the rare occasions when we have to leave town and cannot fly or take a train, we have to rent a car so we can be assured that the airbags will deploy if there should be an accident. And more important, our faith in VW has been tarnished.

Our interactions with the salesman who sold us our current car didn’t much help us keep our faith in VW, either. He didn’t much listen to what we said, gave us a bad deal which we almost immediately regretted accepting, and didn’t make it easy for us to get a part replaced when it fell off immediately after we left the dealer. (The car had been used for several months and several thousand miles by the dealer before we bought it, and in retrospect given we got almost no price break because the dealer didn’t consider it a used car, we should have held out for a fully new car instead).

Our faith in VW and more specifically its dealers also wasn’t bolstered by our experiences with a very nice but different salesman at the same dealer from where we bought our current car. It took a month or more just to get some basic information from him about pricing and whatnot, and despite our repeated attempts, we were never able to get from the salesman or anyone else at the dealer pricing for extended warranties. Apparently, this dealer only gives you that information after you have agreed to purchase a car. And we didn’t appreciate that the dealer, despite our repeated requests to the contrary, placed one telemarketing call to us. Not cool.

So the next car for us likely will not have any farfegnugen. At least not VW-style.

Volkswagen, we hope that next time you encounter a similar issue, you treat your loyal customers better. And Volkswagen dealer, we wish you’d get your information straight and fully answer our questions the first time while not making marketing calls to us.