I have received the official stand from VW Australia on what should happen when you buy a car with a factory fitted RNS510.

"In response to your original query, our dealers are required to hand over the discs at the time of purchase and the customer is responsible for the purchase of new discs as required. The updating of software by the dealers is not recommended by Volkswagen Group Australia."

Should this not happen, the official advice from VW Australia is:

"If any of your members have any concerns with our dealers we recommend that they should get in touch with our customer service department who will investigate their concerns and work with the customer and dealer to address them."

Or you can of course ask me to send you the email that can be printed out and given to the dealer.

Note that any dealer who does not give you a nav DVD is in breach of the End User License Agreement of the mapping software, which is of course illegal, and carries very large fines in the event of successful prosecution. (A Brisbane man was recently fined $1.5m for illegally distributing a copy of a software disc.) Also a dealer who updates nav maps to later versions without supplying you with an original disc is also breaking the law.

What this does mean is that as RNS510 owners we are up for the cost of updating the DVDs when the time comes... V3 is due out imminently I understand, although there is no published date that I have seen as to when they will be released. The cost of these is extremely high (over $1000) and at this stage VW Australia tell me they have no plans to make the discs available through Whereis (the discs for the previous generation VW mav systems are now available directly from Whereis at a cost of about $300). They also tell me "With regards to the pricing of the discs, it is based on the cost to Volkswagen Group Australia. We are in continually working with our head office on this topic."

That's all folks...