From my recent/ongoing experience with VW and my dealer, I've learnt a lot about how their warranty procedure works, and often it's not actually your dealer that's the problem.
The dealer has a certain degree of discrepancy with warranty work, and they apply a lot of common sense to what ever the issue might be. (rusty door seal, not a huge cost, fix it to keep the customer happy and off social media)
When it comes to the bigger problems that the customer assumes is a straight forward warranty fix, this is where it gets more complicated.
From my information, claims are initially excepted or declined by the dealer on a case by case basis. The big issues/claims, if excepted by the dealer as a warranty claim under the warranty terms and conditions, then have to go through to a small dept at VW head office, where it seems they have 4 members of staff that have very little technical knowledge, but a huge knowledge of the common problems, and the standard 'BS' rejection responses, quoting the same made up phrases for each scenario. These 4 members of staff are not available to talk to the dealer staff, and certainly not available to communicate to the public, it's all done via 'customer care'
The bodyshop manager i'm dealing with regarding my blister issue, has been with VW for 20 years, and he's spoke to 1 of the warranty staff on the phone, once in all that time, and that was because they called him. My guy has been fantastic with my issue. He's kept me in the loop at all times, and been totally up front and honest when he's at the end of the road his end, hence me having to take on a lot of my fight at my own cost and my own time.
This might seem a great way for a manufacture to run it's affairs to them. Reject anything big initially, meaning a huge majority of customers giving up, saving potentially millions of pounds across the world. The adverse affect of this is many people take to social media to vent, and I'm sure manufactures are well aware of this, and probably have teams of people monitoring the internet for this type of complaint. But.. they must weigh up and offset any media damage to the company, against the cost of common problems and recalls, and somewhere in a dark room, a choice is made at the highest level to either except the issues and fix them, or carry on giving the warranty dept the green light to keep rejecting them, until the customer fights back and gets other independent bodies involved, which will be a tiny percentage of claims excepted, thus saving the manufacture a huge amount of money.
We all know this isn't confined to the motor industry, it's all part of how big corporations work, constantly weighing up and offsetting customer satisfaction against profit. It won't ever change, and no matter what different bodies and governments impose on different sectors and rules, big business will always find a way to work around them in their favour.
Rant over...
