Germans are famous for many things – bad moustaches, bad brass bands, bad clothing, bad habit of annexing Poland – but a sense of humour is not one of them. To be fair, I’ve never seen a French sitcom, or a Polish one, but spend any amount of time in Germany and you’ll find that the only reason you’ll ever be splitting your sides is because you’ve drunk too much beer and eaten too much pork knuckle.
Yet every now and then, they do provide a glimpse of a kind of dark, weird humour.
This week I visited Volkswagen’s Australian headquarters, mainly to hand over our very special Car of the Year Award for placement in their enormous trophy cabinet (see pic of me with VW Australia boss Anke Koeckler). While I was there I was struck by how much the company has grown in the past decade. It used to have its HQ in a small corner of a business park in inner Sydney, but it has recently moved to a huge, vast site out on the fringes, to cope with its stupendous growth.
Last year, its sales rose 22 per cent in Australia, to 48,242 units, making it the eighth biggest player in our local market. That’s reasonably impressive, but more so when you consider than in 2001 it sold just 10,000 cars in Australia. Globally, VW is a behemoth, selling 8.1 million cars last year alone, making it the second biggest car concern on the planet, behind only GM, and in front of the massive might of Toyota.
No, this isn’t the funny bit. Amid someone spewing all these figures at me I was taken on a walk around the massive new offices and shown a very special room – the stand-up meeting room.
No, it’s not where Jerry Seinfeld meets Eddie Murphy to talk tricks, it’s a serious, actual meeting room, where people stand, or at least lean like startled vampires, against specially designed… well, I guess you’d call them chairs… except you stand in them… stairs perhaps? No, that’s taken. It’s very confusing, anyway, and slightly hilarious to watch.
The theory is, and I kid you not, that making people stand helps them focus on what the meeting is about, and you waste less time talking about how fat K Fed is on those ads for that stupid Excess Rubbish show, or whatever.
Even that’s not an attempt at German humour, though, or not intentionally. What was funny was the cafeteria, which features a whole wall of badly scraped alloy wheels – all of them removed from press cars, all of them victims of appalling driving/a complete inability to park, demonstrated by motoring journalists.
As you can imagine, they really enjoyed showing me this wall, they even smirked a bit, and I’m pretty sure they thought they were being hilarious.
I suggested it would be even funnier if they put the names of the guilty on each wheel, but they weren’t quite willing to go that far.
And I wasn’t completely sure that none of the wheels were my doing.
Still, hands up out there who has never, ever scraped a wheel by parking, eh?
Tell me your worst efforts, if you dare, or the worst efforts of your beloved partners perhaps.
corby what are you doing back here???????I heard you were executed, and did the best spandau polka as you fell….
Ok some time ago!
(4 day old) 3 pce simmons ruined on a gutter by my wife on my beloved gtv6..
vw look like they are making to much money
You shouldn’t have given them their award yet. You should have told them it won’t be available till July, then in July tell them Sept, then in Sept tell the Nov, and then finally give it to them in Dec. And then when the award doesn’t work properly try and claim that its just normal and not covered under any warranty, but even though there is apparently nothing wrong with it you can still apparently offer to repair the ‘not a problem’ for a ridiculous fee.
why didn’t you take me corby,,,,,,, we culd have had nice time togetha.
yoda if you are going to use my name again, use a number…
You wont find those at the Holden or Ford office, maybe some blood and vomet stained stools but not stand up chairs.
Shane, that’s very funny.
Spandau, that’s not.
Duck, that’s very good also. We’re trying to get a stand up meeting room for our TG office, it’s not going well.
I heard a guy last week on an ABC motoring talkback show recommending Toyota for outback driving due to the availability of parts, but as the VW Ragnarok (?) has won so many accolades and I am thinking about getting one myself, I was wondering, Stephen – how is VW going in the regional parts/service stakes in country Australia?
Oksanna, service??? Vat iz dis vord, ve have never heard it before? Parts, ve guarantee if you need a part the longest you vill have to vait is 1 VW week*
*1 VW week is equal to approximately 6 standard months
I waited for few days for radiator[for a popular toyota]in the NT and it never turned up so i was told that they could get me one but it would take another 2 weeks, initially it was suposed to take a day, so 1 toyota week is 1 year.
I live in fairly remote town and Iv never had trouble geting parts and servicing for my VW, I have to cart 4 kids around to school etc, by my self every day because all the kid fathers are all in jail at the moment, I would never go back to a Toyota again.
oh lordy! my sides!
Thin Lizzy, that’s very useful consumer information, and Oksanna, I’m going to send your question to VW and get back to you.
The REAL response from VW:
Regarding your query, we have a national dealer network of 90 dealers covering areas such as Albany, Townsville, Cairns, Darwin, Alice Springs, Geraldton and Kalgoorlie.
Our dealer network is supplied by two parts warehouses in Australia which are based in Sydney and Melbourne.
For parts supplied to our rural dealers – our most remote – we provide a commitment for road freight of 4 days. In some circumstances, we will air freight parts and this takes approximately 2 days.
Our current supply rate out of Sydney & Melbourne is over 97%, which means out of all parts requested we supply 97% off the shelf. For the remaining 3% of back ordered parts supplied from Singapore we can add between 2 – 5 working days depending on the size of the part. Parts supplied out of Germany add an extra 7-10 working days.
If its a part that keeps your vehicle off the road,and you need to get on your way to see this wide brown land of ours, if its a current vehicle, we would pull the part required off a vehicle in stock and get you on your way and replace the part in our vehicle when it arrives
Lol @ Darwinite – VW keeping new vehicles in stock, thats a good joke!
Mr Darwinite, the old part borrowing really sucks,I purchased a car few years ago and when I picked it up from the dealer most of the air condition was missing.
with all the water activities we are doing at the moment looks like the last car standing will be the great wall ute, not hilux or amarok or triton or even land cruisers.
GET NEW STAFF WHO ARE INTRESTED IN CARS, TOP GEAR UK GET 1000S OF BLOGS, YOU ARE RUBBISH….
How can you soar like an eagle when you are surrounded by turkeys?????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ???????????????????
The problem with VW is the German. The tax man doesn’t want you the consumer buying a German vechile so he makes everything that’s inportant too expensive for what it is. Yes you already knew that and that’s stating the ovius So taking that on board if your going to buy a German vechile you may as well think about buying a BMW or Mercedes, there about the same price and a luxuary car.
POPOP your argument it flawed you try to compete with a already established blogg like Top Gear UK on the same topic as cars, there articles aren’t any more interesting they just got alot off fan’s. It is why they blow so much hot air.
I jut wanted to do this for Humour:
Cherry we have been watching you your cars are un safe they do not meet the recomended standard for Australia. We anonymous have decided to wage war on you by posting truthful comments about your vechiles. These vechiles are dangerous and should not be bought Proton’s also fit into this catogory but they never claimed to be good. We are the consumers of the car industry and have decided not to buy your vechiles we want them gone from our shores. We the people have spoken. If more chinese vechiles make it to our shores we will not buy them they are not even good enough to be recycled into a soft drink can. Also anonoymus has decided it wants luxary car tax taken away so we can afford to drive around in Ferrari’s and for no other reason we want this.
We are Legion we do not forgive (that’s bollocks course we do) we do not forget (again bollocks course we do have you ever had a blind bender those were some good times) expect us ( bollocks all we do is nothing so expect nothing.) LOL.
POPOP, thank you for your carefully considered criticism.
Now, go back to amusing yourself.
Great I will, but does that mean that TGA will make some effort, or go down like the Tv show, TGUSA is good so how is it that TGA is so bad, or is it the Egypt syndrome?”money falls out of the sky but everyone is a genius in their own mind cabable of nothing”.
Come on Stephen. Your blogs are dry. They aren’t really car enthusiastic. They’re like yelp blogs.
And the teenage mentality of the writing for the magazine hurts my head, because my head doesn’t know how to regress to that level. The writers try soooo hard to be funny, they miss the point completely and end up sacrifing the point of the content, like the review of the car….
BTW. The Holden Commodore is getting axed. That’s right. But apparently it’s not news to spread around because it’s Holden and not Ford: http://www.businessspecta tor.com.au/bs.nsf/Article /Holden-Commodore-set-to -be-axed-report-pd2012022 1-RPPB9?opendocument&src= rss
The bet is still on too.
Its like you read my thoughts! You seem to know so much approximately this, such as you wrote the guide in it or something. I think that you can do with a few p.c. to drive the message house a bit, but other than that, this is excellent blog. A fantastic read. I’ll certainly be back.