Volkswagen representatives demanded a $150 fee before using GPS to locate the vehicle and child.
A family is suing VW after the company refused to help them locate their carjacked vehicle with their toddler son inside unless the parents or police paid a $150 subscription fee.
Everything started if February of this year when Taylor Shepherd, after pulling into her driveway in her 2021 VW Atlas, was carjacked by two masked men. Worse yet, her two-year-old son was in the backseat when it happened. She tried stopping them but they literally ran over her with the Atlas; breaking her pelvis and putting her six month pregnancy at risk. “They ran over the entire left side of my body. There were tire tracks all over the left side of my stomach,” Shepherd told Fox32.
Shepherd called 911 thinking that she would be able to get GPS info through VW’s vehicle control and tracking Car-Net app. The app turned out to be useless though unless you paid, which is a wild thing to ask in an emergency like this. However that’s exactly what VW did when Lake County Sheriff’s contacted the company for the GPS Data.
read more: https://jalopnik.com/parents-of-baby-in-carjacked-vehicle-are-suing-vw-for-r-1851025357
As a programmer, I will very mildly defend VW here. Not at all defending the payment structure (that’s shit and has no excuse other than rent seeking), but the person who had to tell the police they needed to pay likely didn’t have an override button. Something like this just isn’t an edge case that you often think of in development, so not having the option of getting that data out for free is reasonable if this is the first incident.
Overriding or adjusting payment isn’t an edge case. The article says the reason they refused was company policy. They had the option and said no.
No one thought that theft deterrence might be a use case for a fucking remotely-accessible car GPS?
Management doesn’t have an override button (which tracks their actions) to activate someone’s unit without payment?
I call 1000% bullshit.
I don’t think they’re saying that no one thought of it, but he’s right as a programmer those edge cases are always pushed out, kicking the can down the road. That doesn’t mean VW isn’t liable - it’s their fault still - they should have been able to help. But we can understand how it happened.
They probably called some guy on the 24/7 help line making minimum wage who will get fired if he ever gave out a free service and probably gets dinged if a call gets escalated. Those processes probably don’t exist. They sure as hell will now.
Then a fat settlement / fine will do well to reshape VW’s Priorities.
Since VW has no sense of social obligation it’ll need to be enough to sting. Say half of the net earnings of 2022.
That won’t happen, of course, but then the edge case of unlocking GPS in an emergency won’t be fixed either.
That’s a huge, glaring edge case to ignore for a company as large as VAG. Shouldn’t be acceptable.