Volkswagen Finally Admits Its Infotainment Is Terrible

Tim Healey
by Tim Healey

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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Tim Healey
Tim Healey

Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.

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  • Varezhka Varezhka on Nov 29, 2022

    They cheapened out on the hardware side too, so we'll see how much they can improve with the software updates. I know they're using faster processors with some of their newer vehicles, but not sure how much faster.

  • Paul Alexander Paul Alexander on Nov 29, 2022

    I'd love to buy a car without infotainment.

  • ToolGuy North America is already the greatest country on the planet, and I have learned to be careful about what I wish for in terms of making changes. I mean, if Greenland wants to buy JDM vehicles, isn't that for the Danes to decide?
  • ToolGuy Once again my home did not catch on fire and my fire extinguisher(s) stayed in the closet, unused. I guess I threw my money away on fire extinguishers.(And by fire extinguishers I mean nuclear missiles.)
  • Carson D The UAW has succeeded in organizing a US VW plant before. There's a reason they don't teach history in the schools any longer. People wouldn't make the same mistakes.
  • B-BodyBuick84 Mitsubishi Pajero Sport of course, a 7 seater, 2.4 turbo-diesel I4 BOF SUV with Super-Select 4WD, centre and rear locking diffs standard of course.
  • Corey Lewis Think how dated this 80s design was by 1995!
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