Apologies in advance for my ramblings in this post, which is a bit of a brain dump of my thoughts on the current situation underpinned by the various software issues.
To the casual observer, it would seem that the current Golf was launched before it was ready. Launch had already been delayed to fix ‘certain software issues’ that had been discovered, but clearly Insufficient time was allowed to fix all the issues.
Manufacturers are under immense pressure to get new products to market to attract new buyers to a brand, increase market share and profit, so once a product launch date had been announced, in all likelihood that date is set in stone. It is probably considered bad press within VW - or any other large manufacturer for that matter - to have to push a product launch date back after it’s been made public to allow extra time to fix issues that are discovered during product testing if sufficient time wasn’t originally factored into the project plan for these critically important stages. Launching a product with known issues isn’t good for a company’s reputation either. However, being late to market has short term financial implications (lost sales, reduced revenue and profit), and I dare say the view of the ‘bean counters’ within VW’s ivory towers is that the ‘numbers’ are more important than the customer’s satisfaction, as niggles can be sorted after product launch to keep the customer happy. Therefore, the decision was to launch the car, warts and all, rather than wait until the issues had been fixed. Assuming that was the view taken, then that could prove quite costly and harmful for the brand and their reputation in the short to medium term
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I read on one forum a while back that because of the tech-laden nature of the mk8 Golf, the software was built from scratch, rather than it being an update / modification of the software in the previous generation car. When developing something new from scratch, allowing sufficient time for testing and fixing issues discovered during testing is absolutely critical IMO.
- Did VW’s project plan for the mk8 Golf allow sufficient time for software development and testing? Probably not.
- Were the software developers up to the task? I dare say the software issues are more a consequence of insufficient time allocated to designing, developing and testing the software, rather than the software developers not being up to the task, although it may be a combination of these two factors.
- Do VW have a robust plan in place to fix the issues and keep their dealerships and customers informed of developments and timescales? - based on discussions on this (any many other) forums, it doesn’t appear so.
I think that VW may have taken a step too far with the current Golf in terms of technology, probably because they felt they needed to in order to keep up with their competitors. The worrying thing is that this tech is being incorporated into other new and face lifted models across the VAG empire, so potentially there could be many unhappy customers across all the VAG brands. I do hope VW get their act together and get these issues sorted sooner rather than later to limit damage to their brand, but more importantly, for the sake of the customer.
I’ve read comments on other forums that VW’s competitors also have similar issues with software gremlins, so maybe these issues are the norm within the wider motoring industry? For me, it begs the question ‘do we really need all this tech?’ Admittedly, some of it is very useful, but some seems to be tech for the sake of tech, some aspects of which many customers will probably never use.
I for one won’t be changing by current car for one of VW’s latest high tech models any time soon.