NHTSA complaint #11613500

Owner complaint summary

On August 23, 2024, the car was parked at our home and turned off. It was not connected to the charger. At around 7:25pm Pacific time, I got into the driver's seat, closed the door, and depressed the brake pedal so I could put the car into Drive. While my foot was still on the brake, and the car was still in Park, the car lurched forward towards my husband, who was standing in front of the car. The car moved forward in a fast, jerking movement, less than 2 feet, before stopping on its own. My husband quickly moved to the other side of the alley way. Both console screens went black. I still never took my foot off the brake for fear that it would lurch forward again. I picked up my phone to film the screens to see if they would put up an error message or warning light. Just before I started filming the dashboard, the screen above the steering wheel came back on, but acted weird, with the gears disappearing from the right side of the screen completely around 12 second into the video. You can see in the video that I tried to put the car into gear, but as I move the gear shifter through the various gears it does nothing. My foot remained on the brake pedal the entire time up until the moment you see in the video, when I took my foot off of the brake and the car "restarted" itself, allowing me to get it into a gear again. My husband, or anyone else nearby, would have been severely injured if they had been standing closer to the vehicle when it lurched forward. I took the car to Santa Cruz Volkswagen to be inspected for this issue on 9/3/24. I provided them a detailed description and the video I took, but they were unable to duplicate it. Based on the many other issues I’ve had with this car prior, I believe a combination of faulty electronics, manufacturing defects, and buggy software may have caused this incident. (I uploaded a PDF of service records for this issue from dealer, but could not upload the video: it's 10.3mb MP4 file, which I'm happy to provide if possible.)