What a Joke

Dear Customer Interaction Centre (and anyone else at VW who might eventually bother to read this),

Well, isn’t this just precious — a nice automated reply to my first email, as if an "acknowledgement" somehow constitutes actual customer service. Bravo! I see the commitment to doing the absolute minimum is alive and well at Volkswagen South Africa.

Since the art of actually picking up a phone or writing a real reply seems beyond your team, allow me to once again spell things out for you — in what is now, hilariously, Round Two of this never-ending saga.

On Friday, 6 June, I was finally called and told the car was returned to the dealership after someone had the decency to correct the “two-year-old” panel art project your team gifted me. During this call, I was also informed — with great confidence, I might add — that the EPC warning was traced to a “faulty earth wire,” that the issue was fixed, the car driven, and the dash was clear. Oh joy, what a relief!

Of course, I couldn’t collect it that day — not that anyone cares about my schedule at this point — so yet again I had to rearrange my life to go fetch my car on Monday, turning this delightful experience into yet another personal inconvenience.

And then, the punchline: I arrive on Monday, 9 June, return your empty-tanked test mule, and am reassured once again (through those now painfully fami****, forced smiles) that the panel was fixed, the indicator properly refitted, the car tested, and the issue resolved. I am told — repeatedly — that no further problems should occur.

Two minutes. Two. Whole. Minutes. That’s how long it took after leaving your dealership before the EPC warning light triumphantly reappeared on my dash, as if to mock every empty word I had just been fed.

But I’m sure it’s all in my head, right? Clearly, it’s the customer’s imagination. After all, the car was “driven and tested”, so I must be hallucinating by now — perhaps a side effect of breathing in the fumes of your incompetence.

So here we are again: I am now back in the very same courtesy car — a run-in unit that you’ll soon polish up and sell, no doubt with your usual dazzling honesty — while my own vehicle remains trapped in this comedy of errors you call a service process.

Not once — not once! — has anyone with actual authority (Service Manager? Dealer Principal? Someone with a functioning phone?) had the professional courtesy to contact me directly, apologise, or explain how they intend to resolve this beyond simply resetting the fault light and crossing their fingers.

Let me make this crystal clear: You are now out of excuses. I will not sit quietly while your service team plays amateur hour with my vehicle. I will not tolerate this continuous waste of my time and money. If VW values its customers at all — and frankly, the evidence so far is damning — you had better get your act together.

And no — this email will not be the only way I express my growing frustration. Public platforms exist for a reason.

I await an actual response this time. Preferably from someone who has the authority to make decisions and isn’t simply tasked with auto-generating emails.

Disgusted (still — and increasingly so),