After fueling up at a gas station the 2018 tiguan would not start. it was dead. stationary at the fuel pump. warning lights came on the dash to indicate steering column failure. no symptoms, the car would not try to start or begin to start. just errors on dash. car is only 1 year old with less than 10k miles on it. dealer asked technician to jump car. no change. car had to be towed to dealer. dealer indicated a new steering column needed to be ordered and installed and that it was very odd to have failed. quick research shows this happens all the time on vws. how can a part like this fail in less than 10k miles?
I was driving on the expressway and suddenly my car started veering strongly to the left, heading me directly towards the concrete median. i struggled with the steering wheel to correct back to my lane but ended up moving 2 lanes over and almost into the median. i was able to move back a bit one lane over but seemed to have almost no control over the steering. it seemed the car had taken over steering and i was fighting it, moving side to side among 3 lanes. it was terrifying. it seemed to take several minutes of fighting and trying to regain control of steering my car when suddenly i was able to steer again and stay in my lane. when i took my car to the dealership they said the reason this occurred was that all 4 of the wheels were out of alignment. this makes no sense as i've not hit any potholes or anything that could cause one or two to be out of alignment, never mind all 4. they realigned the wheels and reset the lane assistance. i've since turned off the lane assistance as i no longer trust that feature. too bad since that was one reason i purchased that car.
Today, the car stalled while i was station/stopped at the red light and got dragged by the truck which almost ran over my car. my car's sensor switched to emergency mode and would not let me drive. i wanted to drive my car away when i saw the danger. however, l could not and almost got killed and ran over by the 18 wheels truck.
The safety systems on the vehicle are severely defective. the active lane keep assist frequently tries to steer me into other lanes rather than keeping me in my own, which has nearly caused me to have serious collisions on multiple occasions. the dealer and manufacturer have disregarded my concerns. here is a video of the issue happening multiple times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zzvzgsarle and here is a link i found just today where someone else reported this issue on an online forum over a year ago: https://www.carcomplaints.com/volkswagen/tiguan/2018/steering/steering.shtml#1 i believe that, given the serious safety concerns, volkswagen should be providing me with a full refund for this vehicle under my state's lemon law (and they should be doing so anyways to preserve my safety, to take accountability for the problems in their product, and to thoroughly investigate the problem.)
Sel premium trim lane assist malfunction - system will inaccurately detect lane lines and attempt to adjust the vehicle to the center of the lane, even when it already is centered in the lane, resulting in the vehicle pulling into the adjacent lane. has nearly pulled the vehicle into adjacent lane with another vehicle present in the lane resulting in near collisions on numerous occasions. system will also register as the vehicle somehow departing into the lanes on both sides of vehicle at the same time, and will essentially lock the steering wheel in place. see included photo evidence - both lines on the side of the vehicle are solid white indicating that the departure mitigation is activated, and the green "lane" icon indicates that the lane departure system is currently activated. dealer service department response: ""npf unable to reproduce customers concern".