>Make sure that dealers know why you changed your mind.

"Some nerd couldn't use their nerd phone."

What incentive does a dealer have to know or care about this?

As a dealer, it would be frustrating especially because it is so silly. Basically, if they report any of this to HQ, it would be along the line of "I am losing the sale of a whole car over some stupid app block".

Net Promoter Scores is the only thing that the marketing department cares about. So fill out that customer satisfaction survey, give them a 1 out of 5, and say why. Passives (2-4) are not even considered lol.

What is the risk of letting them know that someone lost trust in VW's features due to a boneheaded decision of their software group and decided not to buy that brand at all?

I wonder what a Venn Diagram of people that use GrapheneOS and people that wish to purchase a Volkswagen vehicle looks like. As of April 2026, the operating system had approximately 400K active users. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrapheneOS

I wish that Volkswagen would care about this, but I suspect they have little incentive to do so.

Volkswagen has a 10% market share in Europe (25% if you consider the whole group: Audi, Cupra, etc.)

Assuming 25% (might be overinflated) of GrapheneOS are European, that’s 10000 European GrapheneOS users who would buy a Volkswagen car (assuming an unbiased distribution of GrapheneOS users, which is probably not the case though).

I don’t think Volkswagen is in a strong position to say they don’t care about 10000 sales in Europe only.

Good point. I wasn't considering the different concentrations of interests by area.

That number might grow substantially when Motorola releases GrapheneOS phones.

You could make a similar argument about voting in democratic elections. It's still important to vote.

What incentive does a dealer have to know or care why a sale fell through? Bizarre question

I'm thinking that the effort required to make that one sale in a thousand is not worth it. The 999 others didn't complain about that.

I think that it is not fair comparison. More likely X % changed their mind and did not go through the purchase. Nobody except this one told the reason? If only this is said aloud, dealers might even make assumptions that maybe others did the decision for same reason, but just did not say it.