VW Gets its First Buyback Evaluation and the Results are Mixed

The first report from Ankura Consulting, the independent organization keeping an eye on Volkswagen as it works to compensate TDI owners, has come out and it finds that many customer complaints are valid as a result of the vast scale of VW’s undertaking.

Recent reports have portrayed the buyback process as slow and difficult, and it seems that despite VW’s best efforts, that is indeed the case.

“Despite significant progress in launching the Claim Program, Volkswagen has experienced some challenges in meeting timing requirements in processing the influx of initial claims,” reports Ankura Consulting.

Essentially, there are a lot of requests to go through and no established model for VW to follow. Ankura’s report finds that there are at least five reasons for that.

Volkswagen didn’t initially have the necessary staff to administer the buybacks, didn’t have any experience processing this many claims, could not buy an off-the-shelf IT system to deal with claims, had a lot of claims from day one, and didn’t have much time to test the system.

Reports also emerged recently that owners of cars with loans still being paid off were having their claims handled more slowly. This, too, turns out to be true.

Of the roughly 38,000 owners who had been given buyback offers in November (the value of which amounts to more than $700 million), fewer than 2,500 were to owners with outstanding loans.

That, finds the report, is because of the extra time it takes to contact loan agencies and to request a payoff statement. Volkswagen is apparently shuffling resources to correct for the imbalance.

Meanwhile, Volkswagen has raised the number of people working in its call centers from just 67 to more than 300 now to better handle the volume of calls coming in and to reduce hold times.

In the end, it’s not a glowing report, but it does at least appear that any faults with the buyback process have mostly to do with the scale of the undertaking and that Volkswagen is making an effort to address them.

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