September 23, 2004


Chairman Wendelin Wiedeking
Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG
Porscheplatz 1
D-70435 Stuttgart, Germany

Dear Dr. Wiedeking:

Having recently taken delivery of the new 997/911 (WPOAA29955S715463). I want to compliment you and your company for building such a wonderful automobile—I love it! The dealership, Silver Star Motor Sports, did a great job handling my trade and delivering the car.

Because I wish you nothing but success, I am writing to suggest that your designers and engineers address a concern of American Porsche loyalists.

1.) The center console includes a telephone keypad that cannot be used as such. My passengers ask about the phone and I have to explain that it does not work as a telephone keypad. We need a “Bluetooth” type solution intergrated with the keypad.

2.) If one does not order Navigation, the console still includes several buttons that are useless, e.g., “Nav,” “Map,” etc. I agree that buttons are better than “I-Drive”, but useless buttons should be eliminated or concealed.

I love the car, but we do need modern communication controls and applications without meaningless icons. Again, I wish you continued success.

Yours truly,



Thomas H. Reilly


c: Peter Schwarzenbauer, President
Paul Gagliardi, Regional Service Manager
Porsche N.A.

Anyone in agreement should write too. It makes a difference.

 

Don't expect a response.

They have your money already.

 

I saw a brochure at the dealership for various phone kits for the 997. They include a holster and integration into the sound system, thus your keypad will work. They have kits for about 10 phones. Mine )Blackberry) doesn't have one of course, but the other kits did look cool.

 

It will not work with the keypad as crazy as that sounds.

 

Thom:

Post some pics of the new car!!!!

 

Amazing...you build a phone car kit...you integrate it with the stereo...you put a phone keypad in the car...BUT YOU CAN'T USE THE PHONE KEYPAD WITH THE PHONE?!?!? That's just moronic.

 

 

Here's a picture of my first Ferrari and my first Porsche.

 

Is that GT Silver? Mine is Arctic Silver. I expect delivery in December. Gongradulations.

 

Looks great - glad to here board sponsor Silver Star did you well

 

It's Artic Silver.

 

Nice pic. Is it possible to post in higher resolution?

And a remarkable well-written, business-like and respectful letter -- all pluses in working with German companies in my experience.

By the way, the expected punctuation is "Dear Sir," not "Dear Dr. Wiedeking:", "Yours sincerely" and "cc." or "Cc." not "c." but this could all be attributed to US business etiquette compared to other parts of the world.

In my experience, letters to public figures in large companies will all be read, digested and filed, no matter the quality or merit of the correspondence or correspondent. Early in my career I designed a "papers" system for government officials. In researching "best practices" I discovered that, for decades, as a matter of public relations, all major companies around the world dutifully processed every single piece of correspondence they received. In short, if you write a letter to the President of the US, it will be read and action will be taken. If you write a letter to 'guy that puts chocolate on my favourite candy bar' to Hersheys, you will very likely receive a reply and a huge box of candy thanking you for letter. If you really want to test the system, write to Porsche (and choose someone still working there) and write "I look forward to confirmation that you have received this letter and will take appropriate action." By the way, in building the papers system, we measured the cost to process -- the cost for the government (in terms of order of magnitude) to read and file a one page letter is less than $1000. The cost to reply is between $1000 and $10,000. The cost to take action is invariably in excess of $100,000. It's been two decades since I built that system (still in operation today with some 8000 users at last count) and I remember one specific case where an irate farmer wrote to complain that his driveway had been blocked by road work crews five times in the preceding few months. After a storm of "boiler plate" replies and increasingly outraged letters from the farmer, I found the file. At that time, the last letter read "if you $%^ don't start $%^@ reading my letters instead of printing these #$%^ photo copy replies, I'm going to load up the trailer on my tractor with pig **** and the next time I can get out my driveway, I'm going to bring a load of the #$%^ you're sending me and dump it on your #$%^ doorstep!!!" I noticed the last letter was dated a year earlier. So I asked round. "Oh yeah, that's the guy that dumped four tons of pig **** outside ... I think that's when they decided to build a papers system to handle letters from farmers and such ... "

 

Dear Sir or Adam:

Thank you for complimenting my letter. You probably know better than I, but "The Little, Brown Handbook", Seventh Edition, disagrees with you regarding the salutation. They also state, "For formal letters, Respectfully, Cordially, Yours truly, and Sincerely are common closes." But, like you said, it may be an American thing.

You may be right about "cc:" vs. "c:", but this is more a matter of style than punctuation and since most of us stopped using carbon copies a generation ago, I decided to start a trend quite some time ago.

I posted the picture at the highest resolution allowed--I'll try again.

 

Tell me you are joking. How do you make an outbound call? I have a 7 series with I-drive and it works fine. The keypad for the phone is in a good location and I can dial without looking at it.

It also has voice recognition but that guy doesnt like me. I did learn how to use commands interlaced with expletives and still be recognized, I wonder if he's bitter about that?

 

No kidding--You are in Porsche "Bazaaro Land".