There were no events leading up to this incident. The heater core broke on my 2000 Volkswagen Passat. When this happened white smoke was emitting into the passenger compartment causing a film on the windshield. This caused a fog on the windows reducing my visibility severely causing me to have to pull over quickly. The smoke has an odor of antifreeze and in fact that is what it was. When I got home I checked the antifreeze and it had dropped to half of what it was. This is a known issue at Volkswagen whose only recourse is that I should have purchased the extended warranty when I bought the car. The worst part about this entire experience is that after nearly crashing my car I have to pay $1200 to repair this defect.

- Princeton, NJ, USA

Windows fogged up due to a faulty heater core. This was causing poor visibility to the driver.

- Douglasville, GA, USA

Heater core defect - this car is only 3 years old with just over 50,000 miles and now needs a new heater core - a $1500 repair! when the heat is turned on, an anti-freeze mist (not too healthy for the driver!) comes out of the vents and all of the windows fog up. The only way to clear the windows is to turn the heat off and sometimes that doesn't even work and we have to turn the A/C on to get the windows de-fogged. I did some research and found that Volkswagen (VW) have had heater core problems for 10+ years, and some of the older VW's were in fact recalled for this problem. VW has obviously not made any changes to the heater cores being put into newer cars. I bought the car in the spring and had no way of knowing that this was going to be an issue until it started to get cold outside. Now I'm stuck trying to get VW to offset the cost.

- Fairfax, VA, USA