Thursday, November 7, 2019

Secret First Test: Driving The 2019 VW Passat At Volkswagen鈥檚 Arizona Proving Ground




Your humble author was among a small group of auto writers to penetrate VW's testing sanctum sanctorum鈥攐nly the second group of journalists ever allowed a tour in the nearly 26-year history of the place. The previous group had arrived just last year, to taste the 2019 Jetta for the first time; we were here for similar reasons, to be the first from the media world to sample the new 2020 Volkswagen Passat. But while we were officially there to drive the new Passats under extraordinarily controlled conditions鈥攎ore on that in a bit鈥攖he Arizona Proving Ground has appeal all its own. Of course, most of the prototypes were hidden even further away, cleared out and shoved into hidden back rooms and behind fences wrapped seamlessly and completely in concealment. Mechanics pop in and out of one such chamber of secrets, while I try in vain to maneuver myself for even the smallest peek inside. No dice. So much for an early Christmas present. Our tour guide, senior facility director James Marsella, steers us instead over to another set of chambers鈥攖he windowless garages used for corrosion testing.





Check that; calling them 鈥済arages鈥?is a bit of a misnomer. A garage is a structure designed to protect a vehicle from the elements; these custom-made rooms, each one a box big enough for two to four vehicles, exist to blast vehicles with concentrated bursts of it to speed up corrosion. Think of it as a time machine for rust. One regimented 90-day cycle through the chambers, Marsella says, is equivalent to 12 years on America鈥檚 East Coast. The first room we enter is 125潞 Fahrenheit and 100 percent humidity; amusingly, all the assembled journalists are wearing glasses, which fog the moment we pass from the arid Arizona air to the swampy indoor atmosphere. The second is a cold chamber, the temperature set to -4潞 F and mighty fans blasting away to keep the air circulating. I step inside and I鈥檓 17 again, working my summer job as a tour guide at the Ben & Jerry鈥檚 factory, trudging into the deep freeze to fetch a new batch of Strawberry Cheesecake for the sample room. The third room is what鈥檚 described to us as a 鈥渟alt fog鈥?chamber; the air in there is a thick London fog as opaque as an actual raincoat. Four steps in, arms extended zombie-like, and I can鈥檛 see my hands. The air tastes like fresh oysters. Once the cars make it through their three months of CIA black site torture in the chambers, they move to the final room, a tall, white room filled with strobe lights and a bank of computers. Here, VW鈥檚 experts rip the cars apart, spot weld by spot weld鈥攏o saws, no jaws of life allowed鈥攖o peel back each layer of metal in search of corrosion. Like archaeologists on a dig, they painstakingly document every single piece of metal, photographing and cataloging it, at which point a team of experts working on computers grade how bad the corrosion is.





To within just a few iotas of never ever buying another VW vehicle again. Let鈥檚 face facts: Volkswagen lied to, and tricked its customers, and even had Powerpoints explaining to their inner circles about how they鈥檇 go about it. But Volkswagen still had a few strands of my interest left, and all of that was based on my own experience with my Jetta. I didn鈥檛 bother with getting the recall work done for a while because my car was running perfectly (you鈥檇 notice faulty glow plugs鈥娾€斺€妝our engine would run very rough). Now move forward about 15 months (so now about 5 months ago). While I normally put about 5,000kms on my car a year, in that 15 months, I put about 3,500kms on it (I wasn鈥檛 driving much at all! Mostly logging one or two 5km trips a week). One day, I got in the car and noticed the engine warning light was on, and stayed on. That鈥檚 new, never seen that before. And the engine was running a tad rough. This was after the whole dieselgate story broke, so I was super nervous about anything happening to my diesel Jetta TDI.





100 to do so. I was nervous about driving the car that far a distance (about 25kms away), so instead I took it to a local VW repair specialist. Glow Plugs malfunction, faulty reading. So鈥?my immediate thought was, 10 years of driving the car with some 53,000 kms on it, never a problem with the glow plugs or an engine warning light. Bring the car into my dealer for recall warranty work done on the glow plugs and harness, and about 3,500kms later, these parts are failing on my car. This is something VW should be fixing at their cost, not mine鈥?or so I thought. I contacted the VW dealer again. That was when I first learned the warranty on the recall work was for 10,000 kilometers鈥?OR 1 year. Whichever came first. So I was SOL (shit out of luck) and I鈥檇 have to pay to have it fixed and replaced. Oh, and I鈥檇 still have to get them to do the diagnostics on it first (and pay for it), because they wouldn鈥檛 accept the third party report from my local VW repair specialists. Of course, they were very polite in saying all of this.





I was just left frustrated. Let鈥檚 step back here a minute. Volkswagen, in the fall and winter of 2015, was a company with a severely damaged customer relations problem (and they still are to this day). You鈥檇 think they would want to do everything possible to repair a problem that was most likely caused by themselves. That they would bend over backwards to make sure every customer they dealt with left their authorized dealers and repair centers happy. I do understand (now) that their recall warranty period is just 1 year; but I also understand that is an arbitrary number and what鈥檚 really important is actual use and mileage. In that case, I still had 6,500kms to go before I鈥檇 put 10,000 kms on the car after their work. And here鈥檚 the real rub. I had 10 years of trouble free driving with my engine as is. Within 3,500 kilometers of VW Canada changing my glowplugs under a recall situation (nothing was wrong with them in my car prior to this 鈥渞epair鈥? I can tell you) these parts and its harness were failing.