Strange email re cambelt change

[Guy]

Today I received an email from info@service-promise.volkswagen.co.uk

It's titled Your cambelt change is due. Big savings available

The body of the email goes on to address me by my name and starts off with :-

Our records show your Polo is due a new cambelt. Not changing your cambelt could cause a fair bit of damage to your engine. You can find out how important the cambelt is here or by watching this film.

When I follow the link it tells me that the cambelt replacement service interval is normally five years. My Polo is 15 months old and has covered 2,100 miles from new so the cambelt is hardly due for a change yet. I've emailed a reply to VW asking for clarification and copied in my local dealer but they haven't replied yet.

It gives the name of my local VW dealer and a telephone number to call them on to book the car in. The number looks plausible - correct local code and quite close to some of the dealership numbers. Yet it does not appear on any of their web Contact pages. I haven't tried ringing it.

I'm a little suspicious. The BT ISP Spam Checker labelled the email as SPAM but that is notoriously unreliable.

Has anyone else had something similar?

[Scarum]

Spam - or VW need money and are frightening customers into unnecessary work. If the latter then VW are walking a fine line in ruining their reputation even further.

[Guy]

I decided to ring the number given and an automated voice answered stating it was my local dealership group and they were redirecting my call to .... At which point I hung up.

So it does seem genuine. I'll wait to see if they answer my email.

What's annoying is if they've gone to the trouble of trawling their database to get name, car model type, and email address they could so easily have also checked age of car and mileage at last service. In my case the last service was with that dealership at 12 months & 1800 miles just over three months ago.

Being reasonably mechanically attuned I'm not too bothered about this but I can easily see how someone could be frightened into thinking they need £350 of work doing on a car they bought brand new only a relatively short time ago. I'd like to think that if such a person actually attempted to book their car in then the penny would drop and it would be explained as a mistake. But even then it would have wasted time and caused unnecessary worry.

I did say in my email that this incident has not inspired confidence in VW or my dealership. Having said that, the dealership service I've received has in general (with one exception which was corrected) quite exemplary until this.

[Guy]

Received an email today titled "Sorry we made a mistake". Text as follows :-

You may have noticed that we contacted you last week to advise that your Car is due a cambelt replacement. This may have come as a surprise to you, as having double checked our records we’ve realised that we made a mistake. To put your mind at rest you do not need to do anything right now and we’ll be in touch again at a time when your cambelt replacement is due.

So all's well than end's well as the saying goes. I do think it's helpful for most people to have an (accurate) reminder of cambelt change becoming due because the consequences of neglecting timely replacement can be so serious.

[RUM4MO]

I do agree with main dealers contacting over things like cam belt changes, luckily for me both cars have chains.

[Scarum]

I do agree with main dealers contacting over things like cam belt changes, luckily for me both cars have chains.

Are they Polos? If so which Polo engines have chains?

[RUM4MO]

I do agree with main dealers contacting over things like cam belt changes, luckily for me both cars have chains.

Are they Polos? If so which Polo engines have chains?

Later Polo 1.2TSI 110 and 90 are certainly back to belts - I stand corrected! My other car is an S4 with 3.0 CAKA engine and chains.

You might say it is easy to get confused over belts/chains, I can't say what the latest 1.0 is though, I would have guessed chain?