Volkswagen Finally Admits Its Infotainment Is Terrible

Car reviewers, myself included, have spent the past year or two ripping Volkswagen infotainment systems. Even when the vehicles have otherwise been positively received, the infotainment systems have gotten poor grades.

There are several reasons for this. The systems lag, the haptic-touch controls often don't work, and lack of knobs for certain functions frustrates.

VW has seen the light, so to speak, and will be responding to pushback from customers and car reviewers and changing things up going forward. That's from a report in Autoblog.

The company already ran an update to its software earlier this year -- with the update meant to speed up response times and improve touch recognition. It also added over-the-air updates.

Chief Operating Officer Thomas Schäfer told Car magazine at this month's Los Angeles Auto Show that the brand would continue to make improvements.

He told the mag that the VW Group Board is involved in monthly meetings about improving the system, and the meetings go beyond mere discussion -- potential improvements are demonstrated and tried out.

Schäfer was quoted as saying: "The [technical] team puts together mock-ups and we sit down and try them. We can say: 'This doesn’t really work. Who the hell did this? Next!'"

Another app update is set for a few weeks from now, though it's not known what this update will entail. Certainly, the addition of OTA updates means that smaller changes and fixes can be made more frequently. Meanwhile, the next Tiguan is expected to get a new steering wheel that will mark the return of physical buttons. It will take longer to change/fix the hardware involved in the infotainment system, because VW Auto Group is so large and because so many suppliers are involved.

[Image: Volkswagen]

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