Volkswagen representatives demanded a $150 fee before using GPS to locate the vehicle and child.
A family is suing VW after the company refused to help them locate their carjacked vehicle with their toddler son inside unless the parents or police paid a $150 subscription fee.
Everything started if February of this year when Taylor Shepherd, after pulling into her driveway in her 2021 VW Atlas, was carjacked by two masked men. Worse yet, her two-year-old son was in the backseat when it happened. She tried stopping them but they literally ran over her with the Atlas; breaking her pelvis and putting her six month pregnancy at risk. “They ran over the entire left side of my body. There were tire tracks all over the left side of my stomach,” Shepherd told Fox32.
Shepherd called 911 thinking that she would be able to get GPS info through VW’s vehicle control and tracking Car-Net app. The app turned out to be useless though unless you paid, which is a wild thing to ask in an emergency like this. However that’s exactly what VW did when Lake County Sheriff’s contacted the company for the GPS Data.
read more: https://jalopnik.com/parents-of-baby-in-carjacked-vehicle-are-suing-vw-for-r-1851025357
So I’m a bit torn on this one… your taxes pay for firefighters and police. However you have to have insurance in emergencies should your house burn down and you want to rebuild, or should something (like your car) get stolen. In all cases, you’re paying to support the infrastructure that provides you a safety net.
Without getting into the social economics of what in this world should actually be free, not paying for this seems to fall outside of that as the person refused to pay for the safety net until it was needed. That’s like trying to go to an insurance company after an accident to get coverage for that accident.
I feel like this is a brainworm capitalist take. The capability was there, were their profits actually more important than locating a kidnapped child?
It’s not like this was going to drain a risk pool of equity and put other people’s coverage at risk; literally ping the fucking car and find out where it is. The capabilities are already there. Save the baby.
Why is this even a question?
liberal answer