How do you say "Jerk" in German?

From the good people at Volkswagen, who last made the news for rigging their cars to pass emissions tests illegally, this little gem: They have something like OnStar, but they call it Car-Net. Car-Net helps you find your car if it is lost or stolen. It's a paid subscription service, and that's the hangup in this tale.

A sheriff's office in Illinois was trying to track a stolen VW with a 2-year-old boy inside by going onto the Car-Net, but Car-Net said, no, sorry, the owners of that car did not subscribe to our service after their free initial trial period ran out, so no. 

The heck with the toddler, I guess.

"While searching for the stolen vehicle and endangered child, sheriff's detectives immediately called Volkswagen Car-Net, in an attempt to track the vehicle," the Lake County sheriff's office said. "Unfortunately, there was a delay, as Volkswagen Car-Net would not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen."

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that "the Car-Net trial period had ended, and a representative wanted $150 to restart the service and locate the SUV."  The article continues...

"The detective pleaded, explaining the 'extremely exigent circumstance,' but the representative didn't budge, saying it was company policy.

Ah! Company policy! It is Volkswagen company policy to let people be terrorized with their child in a stolen car while the detective contacts them, gets their credit card number, and reactivates the Car-Net service for a $150 charge?

And that's all it took! As soon as the VW cash register put that yard-and-a-half in their till, the representative gave the police the location of the stolen vehicle, which, in case I failed to mention it, had a two-year-old child in it.

Toyota is a good example of a car manufacturer
that wouldn't charge you $150 if your missing
child is in one of their vehicles.

And as it happens, by the time the police went through this whole silly 30-minute ballet with the car company, the car had been located "by other means."

For their part, Volkswagen called this a "serious breach" of arrangement with the third-party vendor administrating the Car-Net service.

Why, "Volkswagen has a procedure in place with a third-party provider for Car-Net Support Services involving emergency requests from law enforcement. They have executed this process successfully in previous incidents. Unfortunately, in this instance, there was a serious breach of the process. We are addressing the situation with the parties involved," the company huffed in a statement.

So you see! It's not their fault, and they are going to address the situation, probably through several harshly-worded emails and memos with the subject line: ATTENTION ALL PERSONNEL: IMPORTANT POLICY CLARIFICATION.

Because you know that a huge multi-national corporation has better things to do than to worry about an abducted child, with $150 hanging in the balance.