I had purchased a VW Jetta 1.9 TDI Comfortline with DSG Gearbox in September 2008. The car met with a very bad accident on Thursday last week and is now lying in one of VW dealer’s workshop (Frontier Autoworld, Gurgaon). The cause of the accident was an errant bike driver who came in front of the car and breaked – unable to control the impact to the bike, the car was veered to the left to avoid contact with the bike. This made us ram into the truck next to it and thus the damage. My car registration number is HR 26 AT 9788 – a copy of the registration certificate is enclosed. I was at the back seat that day, probably because of a premonition, and my chauffeur was driving. Thankfully, by the grace of god, no one was hurt.

I would like to bring to your notice a serious issue regarding the safety of the car. This is a high end car and VW has claimed that with 8 airbags you should be secure. I am attaching several pictures of the car post the accident. None of the airbags got deployed. Even with impact reaching one of the columns, the curtain airbag also failed to deploy. I would like to seriously question if the car is safe at all. I shudder to think if I was sitting in the passenger seat what would have happened – and that is my normal sitting position since I am tall and I can stretch completely. Or in other occasions, if I was travelling with family. This could have been disastrous with serious damage or even loss of life.

You can see from the pictures that the impact was not less. The initial estimate by the service manager was > 500,000. At such an impact and damage, the only thing that saved us was the build quality of the car – which I must complement is absolutely top notch.

Firstly, the biggest problem was to get a contact to write my complaint to. There is no email id provided on VW's website - moreover, if you post something, there is no acknowledgement of it ever having been sent. I have been scavenging the internet and my network to get any kind of contact into VW. I did write to their customer care eventually and a few contacts within VW. The response I got was my concerns were 'precious to them' and the dealer in question, Frontier Autoworld in Gurgaon, shall address my queries. I do not want my queries addressed - I want an explanation from VW on false safety claims. And above all, I would like to sue them for compensation for it.

I would like an explanation of why the airbags never deployed – this is a serious flaw and I should know why this was the case. We buy cars based on the features, safety and above all the brand which guarantees the claims of the company. Such an obvious flaw raises doubt of proper testing of the equipment prior to supplying the car in the market.

I would thus like to ask VW to give me a new car and compensation for bearing this trauma. Even if the car is repaired, I am now quite scared of sitting in it since I don’t know if I would be safe. This is a breakdown of what I believe is VW’s prime claim – a safe car!?

Thanks and Regards,

Piyush