Just found your thread Exonian - posted my own the other day.
I'm in Team Bong since about October/November plus mine came with the winter benefit of heated steering wheel always on. Booked in for mid-May with a courtesy car for 2 days to see if they can find the cause but they said steering wheels were the culprit when they'd had similar reported before. Not sure how long the turnaround is for a replacement.
I get the feeling the 'Steering Wheel' is being used as a convenient excuse/scapegoat for any problem that they can't fix. It wouldn't surprise me if they are taking cars in and returning them to customers without changing anything or maybe swapping the wheel of one problem car with another. If they are genuinely fitting new steering wheels to cars where the Hell are they getting them and how much is it costing them? It certainly isn't fixing anything!!
I’ve read on some forums that the steering wheel fix doesn’t seem to be the solution in all cases;
(a) seems to work in some cases
or
(b) provides a temporary fix but the problem comes back after a while.
Agree that replacing all those steering wheels must be incredibly expensive. The quoted post below was posted over on vwroc.com last month by forum member speedjunkie which suggests the entire steering wheel may no longer be replaced - only certain components in the steering wheel;
’Just picked car up. He told me there has been an update to the recall for this “ping” issue and they no longer replace the entire steering wheel. It’s the inner triangle of touch controls (all the electrics and plastic basically). He showed me the photo of the document they had relating to this. It’s on back order and has orders going back to October as it’s a big issue’.Maybe all those steering wheels that have been replaced are being recycled; VW then have the option of either fitting reconditioned steering wheels or just the faulty components in existing steering wheels in customers’ cars to help manage costs. I read a while back on another forum (apologies, can’t remember which forum), that reconditioned parts do get used under certain warranty claims - e.g. warranty claims such as replacement alloy wheels - so maybe this does happen. From personal experience I had some alloys replaced under warranty some years ago on a mk6 GTD because of white worm, and I rejected the ‘new’ replacements as they certainly didn’t look new and factory fresh (poor quality finish); more like a poor quality refurb.
