Verified government source

NHTSA complaint #11688381

This page summarizes an official U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration owner complaint. Use the verification links below to confirm the record directly with NHTSA.

Vehicle

2021 VOLKSWAGEN ATLAS

Manufacturer

Volkswagen Group of America, Inc.

Components

POWER TRAIN,VEHICLE SPEED CONTROL,FUEL/PROPULSION SYSTEM

Dates

Incident: 07/01/2025
Filed: 09/19/2025

Owner complaint summary

The car began revving at lights when I was in drive and stopped at red lights. The normal at rest rev is 0.75 however I have seen it as high as 1.5 and had to put the car into park to reset the acceleration. This had been consistently happening over the past month. The first visit to the dealer, I needed a new battery... that didn't fix the issue. The tech said that after the battery was replaced that the scan showed no error codes. The only codes before the battery replacement were low voltage indicators throughout the car. The next day the same issue happened again. The second scam showed no faults however I asked them to clean the throttle body (which they never suggested) and they did. They said that they recalibrated the new clean throttle body measurement to the computer. For the following 10 days, when I stopped at a light, the tachometer was perfectly stable at 0.75 and there was no "jumping" around like before. Until this day, the acceleration happened at a "stop". However on day 11 after the throttle cleaning, I was SLOWING DOWN to approach a red light and the tachometer revved to 3.0 and I needed to stop immediately and throw it into park. This is so dangerous. I may cause an accident by either lurching forward or needing to hit the breaks to stop the acceleration. There are no error or warning lights that show on the dashboard!!! After the battery was changed, the dealership said they had someone drive it for 10 miles to recreate the issue but found none yet it started up the next day. GROK has been helpful. It suggested first the throttle cleaning which did help, and three other repairs. I'm planning to pay a shop that deals with German cars specifically to scan and evaluate. The car has 43,000 miles on it. This is a testament to German engineering? No longer. I have never seen this in any other of my vehicles. All three uploads failed even though I got them to the most minimum of info.

This is an owner complaint filed with NHTSA (ODI #11688381). It is not automatically an official recall, investigation outcome, or manufacturer admission unless the complaint text itself describes one.

Official record ID (ODI): 11688381. This page is the human-readable source link used across afterwarranty. The raw JSON link proxies NHTSA's public API for machine verification; prefer this page when reading the complaint.