- VW in the US has had to offer customers five years of Car-Net for free after it hampered the recovery of a vehicle.
- Police weren’t able to track a stolen car containing a child via the service until they paid a fee.
- “Volkswagen must and will do better”, the firm said of the incident.
It may be humourous to think of features like seat warmers being locked behind a subscription but what happens when one of the features is actually important?
Back in February, in Lake County USA, a woman’s vehicle was stolen with her 2-year old son inside the car. The car was a Volkswagen.
Quick thinking police officers contacted Volkswagen Car-Net in a bid to track the vehicle but there was a problem.
“Unfortunately, there was a delay, as Volkswagen Car-Net would not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen,” the Lake County Sheriff’s office said per an NBC Chicago report.
This was a failure on Volkswagen’s part and it knows that.
“Volkswagen must and will do better for everyone that trusts our brand and for the law enforcement officials tasked with protecting us,” senior vice president of Customer Experience and Brand Marketing for Volkswagen of America, Rachael Zaluzec, said in a media statement.
“In addition to a full investigation of what went wrong and actions taken to address the failure, we want to make it right for the future. Today, we are setting a new standard for customer peace of mind. As of June 1st, we will make these connected vehicle emergency services free for five years as one significant step we can take as a commitment to our owners and their families.”
From 1st June, all model 2020 to 2023 petrol powered vehicles equipped with Car-Net hardware will have access to Automatic Crash Notifications, Emergency Assistance, Stolen Vehicle Locator, and Anti-Theft Alerts for five years. ID.4 electric vehicles will also have access to Automatic Crash Notifications and Emergency Assistance. To be absolutely clear, this only applies to the USA.
What happens after this five year period is unclear but simply providing free access for existing customers doesn’t solve the problem. That problem being that there are features installed in the vehicle that can’t be accessed without paying even more money on top of the cost of your car to access them.
Will this incident be a signal to other car manufacturers to be more considerate about how they add live service features to their products? We doubt it will as the constant pursuit of profits shrouds all sense, but we live in hope.
