by Joe LaMuraglia
My brother drives a 2009 VW Jetta TDI. As a owner, he gets a subscription to VW’s magazine DasAuto. I intercepted it the other day for some good bathro…I mean, downtime reading material. Owner’s magazines are nothing new and DasAuto magazine has the usual product propaganda and branded trinkets to buy. But I also found some really useful information that VW is offering to their owners – the most interesting being their online instruction manual for new VW owners.
VW’s Owner Welcome site is an online video library of instructions tailored to each vehicle that Volkswagen sells in the U.S.
Say for example, you bought a new 2010 VW Jetta and you are among the 95% of new owners that don’t open their owner’s manual. You probably have NO idea that you can program the car to unlock specific doors when you press the key fob. Well, you CAN and VW outlines it in clear, German-accented English on the Owners Welcome site.
The site has short instructional videos for everything from operating the Multi-Functional display to how to open the rear hatch on a VW Golf (if you need to watch that one, please let me know when you are going to be driving. I don’t want be within 100 miles of you). You can also forward the videos to you mobile device so you can watch them while you are in the vehicle. Excellent stuff.
One suggestion we have for VW: make all these videos available on the Navigation system so the consumer can sit and watch from the front seat when stationary. Otherwise, we love the idea and think others should follow VW’s lead. If Saturn had done this, my sister wouldn’t have gone 6 months of driving an Astra without knowing it had cruise control!