Infotainment calamity
I was interested to learn of a major upgrade to the infotainment system in the Volkswagen Golf, in light of the problems I’ve been having with the similar system in my 2021 Seat Leon.
My experience throws up a lot of questions about honesty and integrity in the Volkswagen Group.
In a nutshell, my car’s system can’t retain addresses or sat-nav settings. Spurious and meaningless messages appear on the screen. The screen with the radio information occasionally changes of its own accord. It can’t reproduce the contacts list from my iphone in the correct order, rendering the addresses unusable to the sat-nav. And messages appear and disappear before I’ve been able to read them.
What’s more, the system has been very badly designed. It takes about six taps to switch off the lane keeping assistance and return to the home screen; and to change to the speed limiter requires me to look at the screen for far too long for safety.
The screen itself is nothing like the responsiveness of the touchscreen on my iphone, either. And why, when entering an address in the UK, does it try to second guess that I want to go to Bratislava when typing Beverley?
I’ve been trying to at least sort the faults, first with the selling dealer, then with another, unsuccessfully.
I’ve twice contacted Seat Customer Services. It acknowledged there were faults with systems throughout the VW Group and a software update was required but could give no date for this becoming available. That was last July, yet this is still the situation. I’ve no confidence in Seat to make it available in a reasonable time, if ever.
Consequently, I’ve rejected the car under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. The dealer was very decent about it and repaid me the invoice price, for which I’m grateful.
Having bought no fewer than nine VW Group cars since 1978, my loyalty has reached an end. I’m no longer prepared to pay such a company, no matter how good the press say its cars are. Nine months with a seriously faulty car that the manufacturer is unable or unwilling to repair: what kind of a warranty is that? Andrew Jackson
Cottingham, East Yorkshire Regrettably, I’m hearing clear echoes of an old long-term test car – KC