I hate VW.. I really do. :-(

Pete.

Anyone know if this is fixed yet? On the new Polo in particular.

Also if you want your car broken into visit Oxford Services early in the morning. The thieving scumbags smashed my passenger side rear quart window to gain access to the boot through the rear seats. 3 days old :( bar stewards.

It's the bastards who are so thick they break in despite the thatcham immob and alarm that bother me. Did several hundred quid of damage to my 16v.

I'm a bit calmer now. ;-)

I'm seriously thinking about getting the driver's door delocked now. Not sure if I want to get everything repaired for the third time only for it to be broken into again.

Haven't got round to writing a letter to VW UK just yet.

JR.

Chris,

Thanks for that suggestion. The system looks great!

JR.

I also removed the radio/cd facia, though I put it in the locker with some old sweet wrappings on top of it. Then I locked the locker with key. Nevertheless, the car was broken into through a smashed side window and radio/cd pulled out and fascia was taken from the locker. It was parked daytime at a University car park with cctv. The cctv tape couldn't be handed over to the Police as it was 'University property' !

I guess it depends on the sort of audio equipment you want in your car. But for the two Passats I owned, I quite liked the Gamma unit. In fact I've still got one, somewhere, when I (rather foolishly, with hindsight) had a Minidisc HU fitted.

Johannes wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@spam-no-chance-sizefitter.com:

Probably the security guards that did the car over then.

Somebody must have observed me putting the radio fascia away in the locker. Probably the guards thought that the Police wouldn't do anything with the tape. But everything on camera can be seen directly on a monitor, so where were the guards? The value of the theft wasn't great, and the radio/cd was skillfully removed. But more than anything, it made me very angry and depressed.

This might be just mere coincidence, but the first attempted break-in occurred almost exactly 4 weeks after getting the car serviced at the main dealer.

The second attempt, only this time successful, happened 2 days after it was at the dealers for a repair job.

Maybe I'm just being paranoid... and the above thoughts are just silly... but the damn break-in are giving me sleepless nights.

JR.

By locker, do you mean the glovebox? If so, no need for anybody to observe you - it's merely the first place to look.

Don't put stuff you care about losing in the glovebox - it really isn't secure at all.

cheers, clive

Never lock your glovebox. Do this and as well as losing whatever was in the glovebox, you'll end up forking out for a new glovebox lid and/or lock.

/john

Good advice.. although mine doesn't have a lock on it anyway.

I wanted to leave it open all the time, but the internal light stays on. Needs to be disabled me thinks.

JR.

Flip out light, remove bulb..... [1]

JR Hartley wrote (apparently) in uk.rec.cars.maintenance on Fri 16 Sep 2005 17:05:05:

I can't see anything wrong with writing to VW, after all if the police are already aware of a problem with the security I would imagine that if the owner's manual has a nice description of what the alarm system is supposed to do but a 'quirk' has come to light, either VW should have advised all owners or at least they are somewhat liable for coming up with an ineffective security system.

It's like all the stuff about the Y2K bug and video recorders where you could apparently make a claim if the equipment was up to six years old, although in that instance no one could really be arsed. It was still the manufacturers that would have been liable for sorting the problem. Even though you could say the year 2000 was definitely expected, I still think that you would have a car with an alarm on the basis that it was, at some point, going to be broken in to in a fairly definite manner. Why bother otherwise?

Don't lose ANY SLEEP ove r a car/radio/cd/or any other MATERIAL possession it's not worth it!

Your HEALTH is the most important thing to you.