Register of unhappy Polo purchasers awaiting delivery...

[Souljak]

The Polo GTI goes on sale in NZ next month, lets hope they dont gobble up too many aussie allocations.

... you would think the Scirocco R would be enough for them though

[GTI JOE]

Hi Folks,
This is the latest response from Germany HQ with regard to Polo GTI orders, not very helpful I'm afraid

Thank you for your further e-mail addressed to our Chairman Prof. Dr. Martin Winterkorn, in which you provide us with the commission number of your order.

We like to assure you that we do our best to fulfil the wishes of our customers as quickly as possible and to deliver our vehicles on time. However, the great success of the new Volkswagen Polo in Australia, which also won the "Car of the Year" award last year, resulted in a very high demand of this model. Although we, of course, appreciate the great interest in our Polo, we have on the other hand exceeded production capacities, which lead to difficulties in keeping up with the production dates.

Orders for vehicles are collected by our importers and sent to us in bulk. Despite the commission number that your Volkswagen retailer has received from our importer, Volkswagen Group Australia, we have to inform you that, regrettably, it is yet not possible for us to determine the delivery date of your car.

We sincerely apologise that we are still not in a position to provide you with dependable information on your order. Our importer or your Volkswagen dealer will keep you updated on delivery status of your Polo GTI.

Yours sincerely,
i.V. Michelina Lauriola Maenza i.V. Knud Korthals

Volkswagen AG
38436 Wolfsburg
Tel +49 (0) 1805 865579*
Fax +49 (0) 1805 329865*
Mail to kundenbetreuung@volkswagen.de
Homepage Volkswagen Deutschland

To which I replied:

Dear Michelina,

I appreciate your reply although I am extremely disappointed with your response. I fully understand your production difficulties, however, considering I do not have any experience in the car manufacturing industry, even I knew that the Polo GTI was going to be an extremely popular vehicle here in Australia, therefore your marketing/research department should of expected this and made the necessary adjustments to the allocations for Australia. I still cannot understand how the Volkswagen Group miscalculated so terribly and how you can launch a new car in Australia and expect customers to patiently wait for up to 10 months for delivery. You must address this problem very quickly as I fear that the Volkswagen Group will be alienating its clients and become a car company that cannot be distrusted in delivering vehicles in a reasonable time frame. This will cause people to look at other manufacturers, other brands which can deliver.

I also believe that your ordering system is very perplexing, bulk orders? This basically means that Australian orders can be sitting in the system for an indeterminate time which creates undetermined delivery times. Customers want to know when their vehicles are coming, not a "ball park" figure. I sincerely hope you can find a solution to this problem. I like Volkswagen vehicles very much, their performance and the quality of their build, but 10 months wait?, seriously not good enough.

Perhaps a solution is to build another Volkswagen plant here in Australia to service the Oceania and Asian sector, this would alleviate the stress on your other production facilities and help your future customers, but I am sure that you have considered this already, I hope so anyway.

So I guess the status quo....keep waitin and dreamin

I will wait for any confirmed-set in stone-final details as they come to hand. Hopefully end of next week.

[barrenjoey owl]

Hi Folks,
This is the latest response from Germany HQ with regard to Polo GTI orders, not very helpful I'm afraid

Thank you for your further e-mail addressed to our Chairman Prof. Dr. Martin Winterkorn, in which you provide us with the commission number of your order.

We like to assure you that we do our best to fulfil the wishes of our customers as quickly as possible and to deliver our vehicles on time. However, the great success of the new Volkswagen Polo in Australia, which also won the "Car of the Year" award last year, resulted in a very high demand of this model. Although we, of course, appreciate the great interest in our Polo, we have on the other hand exceeded production capacities, which lead to difficulties in keeping up with the production dates.

Orders for vehicles are collected by our importers and sent to us in bulk. Despite the commission number that your Volkswagen retailer has received from our importer, Volkswagen Group Australia, we have to inform you that, regrettably, it is yet not possible for us to determine the delivery date of your car.

We sincerely apologise that we are still not in a position to provide you with dependable information on your order. Our importer or your Volkswagen dealer will keep you updated on delivery status of your Polo GTI.

Yours sincerely,
i.V. Michelina Lauriola Maenza i.V. Knud Korthals

Volkswagen AG
38436 Wolfsburg
Tel +49 (0) 1805 865579*
Fax +49 (0) 1805 329865*
Mail to kundenbetreuung@volkswagen.de
Homepage Volkswagen Deutschland

To which I replied:

Dear Michelina,

I appreciate your reply although I am extremely disappointed with your response. I fully understand your production difficulties, however, considering I do not have any experience in the car manufacturing industry, even I knew that the Polo GTI was going to be an extremely popular vehicle here in Australia, therefore your marketing/research department should of expected this and made the necessary adjustments to the allocations for Australia. I still cannot understand how the Volkswagen Group miscalculated so terribly and how you can launch a new car in Australia and expect customers to patiently wait for up to 10 months for delivery. You must address this problem very quickly as I fear that the Volkswagen Group will be alienating its clients and become a car company that cannot be distrusted in delivering vehicles in a reasonable time frame. This will cause people to look at other manufacturers, other brands which can deliver.

I also believe that your ordering system is very perplexing, bulk orders? This basically means that Australian orders can be sitting in the system for an indeterminate time which creates undetermined delivery times. Customers want to know when their vehicles are coming, not a "ball park" figure. I sincerely hope you can find a solution to this problem. I like Volkswagen vehicles very much, their performance and the quality of their build, but 10 months wait?, seriously not good enough.

Perhaps a solution is to build another Volkswagen plant here in Australia to service the Oceania and Asian sector, this would alleviate the stress on your other production facilities and help your future customers, but I am sure that you have considered this already, I hope so anyway.

So I guess the status quo....keep waitin and dreamin

I will wait for any confirmed-set in stone-final details as they come to hand. Hopefully end of next week.

So now you know that VWA were telling the truth...........it's not a great result but you've heard it from the horses mouth.

[Frostee]

I received a very similar reply, nothing new here;

Thank you for your e-mail and the letter, which you have addressed to Professor Dr. Martin Winterkorn, Chaiman of Board of
Management. As the responsible department for customer concerns, we have been requested to reply.

We appreciate your interest in our products and are glad that you have decided to purchase the new Volkswagen Polo at Camberwell
Volkswagen. Thank you for the confidence placed in our brand.

All the more, we really understand your disappointment and your frustration because of the delayed delivery of your car and
apologise for any inconvenience this is causing you.

We assure you that we do our best to fulfil the wishes of our customers as quickly as possible and to deliver our vehicles on
time. However, the great success of the new Volkswagen Polo in Australia, which also won the "Car of the Year" award last year,
resulted to a very high demand of this model. Although, we of course appreciate the great interest in our Polo, we have on the
other hand exceeded production capacities, which lead to difficulties in keeping up with the production dates.

As it is not possible for us to ascertain individual vehicle orders, which are sent to us in bulk, we have forwarded this
correspondence to our importer

VOLKSWAGEN Group Australia Ltd
The Lakes Business Park
6 Lord Street Botany NSW 2019
PO Box 2316
Strawberry Hills, NSW
Australia
E-mail: customerservice@volkswagen.com.au

and their Management, asking them to verify the delivery date of your car. The importer or your Volkswagen dealer will update
you on delivery status as soon as possible.

Thank you again for taking time to inform us about your dissatisfaction and to bring this matter to our attention.

Yours sincerely,
i.V. Michelina Lauriola Maenza i.V. Karin Gaedecke
guess the status quo....keep waitin and dreamin

I will wait for any confirmed-set in stone-final details as they come to hand. Hopefully end of next week.
So now you know that
Volkswagen AG
38436 Wolfsburg
Tel +49 (0) 1805 865579*
Fax +49 (0) 1805 329865*

[GTI JOE]

So now you know that VWA were telling the truth...........it's not a great result but you've heard it from the horses mouth.

I never said that VGA was not telling the truth, the whole point of the exercise was to try to obtain a fairer deal in Australia and to send a message to VW HQ to increase their allocations to service their customers here and stop these lengthy delays in delivery. Why not build another factory?

[gavs]

So now you know that VWA were telling the truth...........it's not a great result but you've heard it from the horses mouth.

Ahhh, not quite. Aside from the fact that none of us who have contacted head office in Wolfsburg were told by VWA head office any of the information that VW HO gave us, I would say that comments like "....they said the sunroof is what causing the long delay..." or "If you didn't pick all the options then you'd get a car quicker" would show they had no idea about why they weren't getting cars. Persons higher in the food chain might have, but the customer-service hacks had no idea...

It also doesn't explain how suddenly those of us lucky enough have now been told there are "extra production slots" for our cars to be built when the factory apparently is already running at full capacity with no more room for cars, especially ones that are "bulk ordered" by VWA...


Oh, and on a side note barrenjoey owl,

It wont work because VWA are simply distributers for head Office. they call only sell what they receive. Its VW HO who control the supply.

I will try and explain simply for you.

VWA do a sales forecast based on many factors and place orders to VW HO. All of the other subsideries around the world do the same.

Depending on the volume and specification of each countries orders and the availabilty of parts and supplys, flexibilty of distribution resources cars are built and distributed to each country.

if you think that they make each car individually when an order is placed you're going to be disappointed.

manufacturing is a complex process that you and your 21 mates don't seem to understand and is hardly a reliable sort of strategic thought.

I think "me and my 21 mates" might know something about manufacturing, especially automotive products, seeing as we are the team that create every new product from scratch for Australia's biggest and best 4x4 accessory manufacturer, maybe you have heard of us?

ARB 4x4 Accessories

[markwid]

Someone else posted this link in mk6 section. Might be of interest.

Volkswagen Shuts Down Wolfsburg | The Truth About Cars

[barrenjoey owl]

Ahhh, not quite. Aside from the fact that none of us who have contacted head office in Wolfsburg were told by VWA head office any of the information that VW HO gave us, I would say that comments like "....they said the sunroof is what causing the long delay..." or "If you didn't pick all the options then you'd get a car quicker" would show they had no idea about why they weren't getting cars. Persons higher in the food chain might have, but the customer-service hacks had no idea...

It also doesn't explain how suddenly those of us lucky enough have now been told there are "extra production slots" for our cars to be built when the factory apparently is already running at full capacity with no more room for cars, especially ones that are "bulk ordered" by VWA...


Oh, and on a side note barrenjoey owl,



I think "me and my 21 mates" might know something about manufacturing, especially automotive products, seeing as we are the team that create every new product from scratch for Australia's biggest and best 4x4 accessory manufacturer, maybe you have heard of us?

ARB 4x4 Accessories

Your side note is noted and I'm agreat fan of the ARB product range.

However to compare ARB to VW Worldwide manufacturing is comparing apples and oranges.

You've been advised of the situation, you'll just have to live with it.

cheers

[pologti18t]

I hope the squeaky wheels here aren't doing it in the hope of getting their wheels "oiled" before others in the queue

[gavs]

I hope the squeaky wheels here aren't doing it in the hope of getting their wheels "oiled" before others in the queue

Well, mine was one of the first ones on order already, so I don't know about others but it seems through my research that it goes by date of the vehicle entered into the system by the dealer, then finalised as a finished vehicle when a customer's name is put to the car. So all the "squeeking" theoretically amounts to nothing But if someone gets their car before me from squeeking...... I'll go he!