This data is from the NHTSA — the US gov't agency tasked with vehicle safety. Complaints are spread across multiple & redundant categories, & are not organized by problem.
So how do you find out what problems are occurring? For this NHTSA complaint data, the only way is to read through the comments below. Any duplicates or errors? It's not us.
Went to go grab lunch yesterday. As I parked I placed the parking brake on. However once I came back to the car. The brake would not remove itself. The system kept reading parking brake fault. I had to wait there until a tow trunk came to tow me to the dealer. The car would not move. This is very unsafe. I have also came to park a few times in the brake placed itself on.
Leaving my home on my way to work in the am my brakes failed the pedal went all the way down panic and pumping they returned before I reached the stop sign, the 2007 Passat wagon has no ebrake just a button for the parking brake, which I did not use. I drove the car for the next 2 weeks without it happening again, then at the same stop sign (the first one I reach when I leave my house in the am) it happened again, pedal to the floor, pump, panic & just before the intersection they work. The weather on both occasions was rainy, and about 38 degrees. I took the car to the dealer, they could find nothing wrong with the brakes, the mechanic said if I was desperate I could push and hold the parking brake button this would lock the cars brakes and put it into a skid. I am still driving it without any more failures but I fear another one will. The only reason I was lucky enough to not have a crash from the failures is because this is rural driving.
I own a 2007 Volkswagen Passat wagon with a 2.0 liter turbo engine. It was purchased in July 2008 as a certified pre owned vehicle with roughly 8,000 miles on it. Almost immediately, I noticed when the brake pedal was pressed hard, the pedal would go all the way to the floor. VW inspected this and told me that it was designed to function this way. The problem with this (as I discovered later on) is that the brake pedal and gas pedal are very close together. In an emergency situation when the brake pedal is pressed hard, it goes past the gas pedal. On two occassions when braking hard in an emergency, my foot caught on the gas pedal and I was applying the accelerator when trying to brake. This is a serious design flaw that could potentially be very dangerous. Volkswagen continues to tell me that this is how the car is and that nothing can be done for me.
- Boca Raton, FL, USA
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- Baltimore, MD, USA