The infotainment screen has become very much the control center of the modern automobile. Thus, when it stops working, it’s all the more frustrating for the end user. For some owners of the 2024 Volkswagen Atlas, it’s an altogether common occurrence with a rather oddball failure mode.
The story comes to us from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous to avoid causing headaches in their warranty discussions with VW, so we’ll refer to our source as Terrance. “I have become the recent owner of a brand new 2024 Atlas,” Terrance told The Autopian. “Literally the second time I started it, the screen looked like a 1980s TV in need of adjustment of the rabbit ears.” [Ed note: these things, for anyone too young to remember – Pete] The screen, which is key to controlling so much of the vehicle, was virtually unusable, the same day Terrance received the vehicle.
Terrance isn’t alone. The Internet is awash in stories of Atlas owners struggling with their infotainment screens going all snowy and weird on them. Let’s explore what’s going on, and what can be done to help.
Screen Woes
Terrance’s story is a frustrating one. The day you purchase a new vehicle should be one of excitement and joy. Instead, they were faced with a sticky problem almost immediately. “The first time it happened was one hour after taking delivery, with around 20 miles on the odometer,” says Terrance. “The second time was maybe two starts after that.” The problem isn’t continuous, but it does come back on the regular. “It hasn’t done it for a couple of days,” Terrance explains. “Our dealer acknowledges this is a common issue and wants me to grab a picture next time it happens.”
Head to Reddit, visit Facebook, or hit the forums – you’ll find plenty of owners tangling with the same issue. If you grew up in the era of analog television, the Atlas screen problems will look familiar to you. In many cases, the screen appears overlaid with a sort of snowy noise that you’d get on an old TV set when it wasn’t properly tuned to a broadcast channel.
While the failure pattern it does look like TV static, it’s worth noting that this is more coincidence than anything else. The VW Atlas uses a digital screen, and isn’t “tuned in” to anything. Instead, the noise is most likely due to some sort of failure of the electronics that drive the screen, or some type of digital noise or corruption entering the data lines that feed the screen. It’s worth noting that, appearance aside, the screen still appears to function normally while the problem is occurring, with the user able to flip between different parts of the infotainment system even while it’s in the noisy, distorted state.
Thankfully, there is a temporary short-term fix for this problem. It’s possible to perform a reset of the infotainment system by holding down the power button for some 45 seconds or so, as seen below on YouTube. This will usually clear the distortion on the screen. However, it doesn’t appear to prevent the problem from reoccurring at a later point.
Hank Dy has had much the same problem, and he can confirm this fix is only a band-aid for the real problem. “Happened right [on the] first day,” he says. “[The dealer tech] said, ‘No worries, just a small glitch,’ just do a hard reset and you should be good.” He’s found the screen issues come back around twice a week or so. “I need the rear cam when I back out, [it’s] useless with this display issue,” says Hank. “The display is still on back order and I [have been] waiting now for three months.”
Patricia tells a similar story of her 2024 Atlas Cross Sport. “Leased in March 2024, 4000 miles and this is what I came across the other day,” she says. “It was back to normal after leaving the car off for a few hours but I know my future will look like this again soon based on so many customers having the same issue!”
This issue is particularly annoying given how much of the vehicle is controlled by the infotainment system. The 2024 VW Atlas doesn’t just run audio and navigation via the touchscreen; the HVAC is run through the screen, too. It appears that it’s still possible to use the touch sliders to change settings when the screen is distorted, but it’s harder to see what’s going on in this state.
Some customers say they have been offered software updates which haven’t solved the issue. Others mention that they are waiting for their screens to be replaced, but parts are on backorder.
Perhaps most interesting, though, is the case of one Felicia Garcia, who notes that she has struggled with the problem for months. “I have since had screen parts replaced and the full screen replaced and this issue is still persistent,” she told the Volkswagen Atlas Complaints group. “The car is in the shop currently for round three on this issue – they said they are replacing connecting parts and wires this time but have already informed me ‘not to be hopeful.'”
At this stage, it appears the “static” or screen distortion issue is not reflected by public documentation or an NHTSA recall. While the 2024 Volkswagen Atlas has been recalled, along with certain Golf models, it was due to a delay in the rearview camera being displayed on the main screen. Some, like Stephanie Wiese, say their problems only began once the recall work was completed on their vehicle. “Mine worked perfectly until they did the recall update, the next day it started,” Stephanie told The Autopian.
Stephanie notes the problem happens once a week or so. “I have to turn the car off, get out, and then lock the door with the keyfob, then I get back in and it works fine,” she explains. “There is no software fix for what I am experiencing, I’ve been told.”
You’ll find similar stories elsewhere, too. On Reddit, user ComplexCranberry7131 noted that they had “never had any issues with the screen” until after the recall. Whether that’s a causative factor, or just a coincidence, we can’t say at this stage.
The Autopian has contacted Volkswagen for its comment on this issue. Many owners will be hoping that a fix is in the works. The biggest concern for many will be whether or not the screens can be fixed, or whether replacement parts that work are available.
Interestingly, though, I did get one comment from someone who appears to work at a Volkswagen dealership. I’ve chosen to keep them anonymous, but here’s what they had to say:
Credit: Christina Jackson Marks
The truth is that technology has become a major selling point for modern vehicles. Consumers like technology when it works, and may even love it – but quickly lose patience when it doesn’t. It’s all the worse when malfunctioning modern technology gets in the way of using a vehicle’s basic, essential features. It’s also one thing for a vehicle to fail after some years of service, and a whole other matter when it reveals problems the week – or the day! – after delivery.
In this case, it seems the 2024 Volkswagen Atlas may have been quite the disappointment to many eager new buyers. Here’s hoping the German automaker can get on top of things.
Image credits: Reese Sells Cars Volkswagen Guru via YouTube screenshot, VW, Hank Dy, Patricia Fiorella Ciotto, Christina Jackson Marks, Stephanie Wiese
The Atlas infotainment according to VW’s website:
“It will be hard to miss out on anything…So, you can enjoy a crystal-clear view. And get where you’re going without the added stress. What a relief.”
I had similar issues with a new 2017 Jetta. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Fahrvergnugen!
Does it come with a scrambled Spice channel filter, too?
My ID.4 had this same infotainment system, but a different problem. It would randomly and frequently restart. This made the screen almost useless, which meant no radio and no changing HVAC settings most of the time. Of course, VW had no fix identified. The one saving grace was that the infotainment unit would work fine for about 15-20 minutes during the first drive of the day.
My experience with laptops and other LCD screens but mostly laptops is that there is a bad ribbon cable or connector involved. The reason it is mostly laptops is other screens either don’t get bumped around as much or if they are phones they are fused into one solid piece. Also hinge.
Anyway, an intermittent fault in the display’s clock signal could certainly produce a mess like that.
If you’re going to put every control in the infotainment screen, you better make damn sure it’s reliable.
German engineering. German reliability.
I’ve argued for a long time infotainment screens should just be little touchscreen monitors that use USB-C that are easily replaceable if they break.
Why do you hate corporate profits?
It’s not the screens, it’s the infotainment head units. Similar shit happens on some of the Mk7 Golfs. Despite what the ‘dealer’ employee says, fixing this costs a lot of money and I believe VW will do everything they can to minimize that cost.
I don’t know precisely what goes bad on the Atlas head units, but I assume it’s virtually the same as the Panasonic made ones that fail on the Golfs because the results are so close. Everything functions, but the chip driving the screen seems to lose sync or has a weak connection that degrades the signal to the actual display. That’s why a reset/reboot helps for a time.
I also assume the head units are built to VW spec by Panasonic (or others manufacturers) and so any faults are entirely for VW to solve.
See my comment above about ribbon cable and clock line.
Indeed about the clock line. However, I don’t believe it’s merely a cable or connector issue else that would be quite easy to repair. I believe it’s a signal failure within one of the board IC chips. If it were just a connection there would be plenty of cheap repaired Mk7 Golf head units for sale. Alas, there are not.
Reviving a 1979 VW Rabbit TV ad:
“Volkswagen does it… again!”
Yet another electronic gremlin from this automaker. Again. I’m shocked.
There is nothing wrong with your infotainment screen. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your infotainment screen. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer Limits.
These VHS filters are getting out of control
I fully agree this would be annoying, especially on a brand new car, but I don’t think “every few days I have to hold the power button to reboot my infotainment” is as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be. If this happened and then stayed that way forever, like CUE screen delamination, then yeah it would be really bad. You can fix this in less than a minute and be good for a few days, though…come on. As long as they get to the root of the issue and issue a TSB this really isn’t any different than so many other “first year growing pains” common in the industry.
Except these are not first year growing pains. This is on a model that’s been out for god, I dunno, 7+ years and only just was refreshed with this god forsaken screen. It sounds like this isn’t just on the Atlas either, which means this problem is happening on other models like the GTI that have been established longer. At any rate, VW is fucking things up with their tech once again – and I’m not deliberately hating on VW here. I’ve owned 8 of their vehicles from several brands. Their downward spiral into the abyss of screens is what really pisses me off though.
And this is why you should always have analog controls. Because, you can still drive the vehicle comfortably, while you wait for whatever hardware/software fix to arrive, be scheduled for service.
STFU with your old fashioned, and sensible ideas…/s
I had that happen once, a week or two after getting my 22 GTI, it happened when I reversed into a spot. Gone once I turned it off and on again and hasn’t returned in over a year. So.. really weird. Exact same distortion as some of the worst examples posted.
Would be way cooler if instead of static you got a scrambled channel 67.
As others have said, this is one of the many weaknesses of having every damn function accessible or displayed through the infotainment screen.
Sure you showed a picture of a an old television but didn’t explain what static was. I suspect that everyone under 25 (maybe 30) thinks of a bad connection as a solid blue screen and not a grey wiggly field.
Incidentally, this totally changes the meaning of the first line of Willian Gibson’s Neuromancer: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
That line from Neuromancer (and the changing meaning of the phrase as television technology changed) got a nod in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere with the line “The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.”
Is the “static” screen static, as in not moving, or is it wiggling like real analog static?
It’s non-moving as per the videos.
I didn’t notice there were videos. Whoops
It’s not just random garbage, it’s a corruption of the displayed image. It changes with the image and you can see an echo of the base image.
That’s probably not the clock of the video stream. I would expect that to be less regular, less consistent.
I’m going to guess a configuration issue. The display’s configuration is set up wrong or somehow changed after initial setup. Maybe something like the display expects 10bit data instead of the 12-bits it’s getting. This case is probably not actually a bit depth problem, but that’s the general idea. Somehow a register write goes wrong and then the whole config is wrong. It stays wrong until a reset resends the config.
Since this is reportedly associated with a SW update that made the backup camera view come up faster I bet they pushed the config faster. Increase the control channel clock speed (i2c or SPI or whatever) and something in the chain is marginal. Sometimes it drops a bit or a whole write and there is the broken config.
Actually with how consistent the effect seems to be maybe they cut the margin on start up times. You have a component with a specified startup time, apply power, wait, send config. If you leave some margin in that delay time you never get an issue. But if you’re trying to come up faster you might cut that time too close and start before the part is ready. You could get similar errors each time because it’s always the first few settings that get dropped.
I would be mad too if I was paying monthly payments + high insurance and had to deal with a large portion of my car not working correctly. I’m a bit of a grouch when it comes to tech failing. My gut reaction is to go Office Space on it with a baseball bat.
Why does it need a screen again?
Oh, right, it doesn’t.
Where do you put your phone to display navigation so that it doesn’t create any blind spots, or block vents or other features?
And how do you change your vehicle settings like the headlight-off delay after turning it off, or whether it unlocks after shifting to park?
I don’t trust my memory skills like that, especially on long drives…plus you can’t use voice commands to add unplanned stops.
That setting needs to be changed from the manual? That doesn’t sound very intuitive. It’s a nice way to centralize those settings. My car has 6 or 7, but I’m sure the average newer car has more. Even things like the remote “chirp” volume.
“In my pocket. I study nav maps BEFORE I start driving”
Also works great for live traffic updates.
Oh, wait…
I use my eyes for those. See traffic, turn off road.
Yeah, OK. That’s real helpful trying to decide the quickest way to get into work.
After 16 years, it does.
If it works for you great. Pretty sure 99.999999999999999999999% of everyone else is going to do better with live traffic updates.
Yeah, but those people are lousy drivers so it doesn’t matter.
Great attitude from the “tech” ugh. They’ve seen so much of this it isn’t a big deal to them anymore, but it sure is to the customer. VW has really shot themselves in the foot for awhile now, and the dealer service departments don’t help. Don’t ask me how I know.
Of course VW’s recent news proves the point, in my opinion at least.
From what I can gather you have seven days to get someone else to buy a VW or some woman who needs a haircut crawls out of there.
Frigging VW man. I hate the atlas screens on the 2024 models. The fact that they went from a perfect HVAC control implementation in 2023 (and prior models) to the hot garbage of the screen is even worse. EVERYTHING is controlled by the screen. The rear camera not showing up properly will eventually result in a recall or investigation from the NHTSA I am guessing.
My wife’s 2022 tiguan has had a similar experience in the VW service department. First it was incessant Travel Assist errors (basically VW’s suite of active safety features). When the error happened, you’d get a chime and the active safety would switch off. THis would happen dozens of times during a drive. Finally got the steering wheel replaced after a backorder of nearly a year for those parts and it fixed it. But then the steering wheel heating would randomly come on and that required a second replacement of the steering wheel. We’re on wheel three here folks.
All the while, the GPS signal inside the car keeps fouling up at random and then screws up EVERYTHING relying on it, including your phone’s apple car play projection – not just the built in navigation. Yeah, it sucks ass, and there’s no way to fix it. And the service advisor told me after the third time I took it in for this that VW knows about the issue and “is working on a fix, but there’s no ETA and it affects all the cars”. FFS Volkswagen, go back to making simple cars that work. I’m over this shit.
I should add that I bought this car used as a 1-year old vehicle from a non-VW dealer. I now know why it had been traded in at a GMC/Buick dealer. If it had been purchased new by me, I would have lemon lawed this thing long ago.
The GPS error is usually caused by the Carnet module, I’m not a tech but I work at a VW dealership. We’ve replaced a lot of them.
Thank you! I guess next time this car goes in for service I’ll mention the Carnet module.
All-encompassing screens are a pox on drivers. Bah! It’s merely technology for technology’s sake. And that VW tech sure loves the corporate kool-aid. He hasn’t got a clue.
That tech’s attitude is crappy. It may not be pervasive, but it is a very big deal. It renders the screen unusable or largely unusable, which in all of VW’s idiotic touch screen wisdom, renders many functions of the vehicle unusable. It is a big deal to have brand new vehicle owners posting failures and possible workarounds for their 20-mile-old car
It also speaks to the continuation of VW’s steadfast refusal to do any kind of quality control for any system or subsystem.
Is it diesel-cheating bad? No. Is it still a big deal and a bad look? Absolutely.
My entirely uneducated guess is bad/cheap cables. I worked for a laser integrations company and data signals getting fucked because of noise from other cables/electric sources was always an issue. Sourcing and purchasing high quality cables was both a hassle and necessary to properly functioning machines.
So they cheaped out and didn’t buy the Monster gold plated cables?
Some “audiophiles*” drink so much Kool-Aid, even Reverend Jones would beg them to stop.
*I hear the snobby ones laugh at Monster cables
As someone who plays with ATSC television antennas, I can confirm. Brand-new, perfect-condition cables with good shielding are critical for digital signals, which can be so easily corrupted with only a little bit of noise.
The fix could be as easy as rerouting a wire
But you forgot VW is German, they probably designed with the tolerane so tight, the signal will degrade if it is lengthened an extra 1mm and it necessitates a redesign of all the modules and the screens.
Try reversing the polarity. That ALWAYS works on TV.
“My entirely uneducated guess is bad/cheap cables.”
+1
That’s my thought as well.
As someone who spends too much time fixing IT things, I agree. In fact, we were in the doctors office the other day, and their ultrasound machine screen had lines burning through it. First checked cables, and then found that they had added a right angle adapter. Popped out the adapter and it cleared up.
It’s either that, or another option their flexible flat display ribbon cables have too much tension and bumps are causing them to pull out of the connector.
I shall call this malfunction displaysia.
Electrocrystile dysfunction.