Small pet peeve of mine: your experience isn’t with “VW”, it’s with your local dealership. There’s VW dealerships active here (or at the very least, were) where the experience was apparently just great (Marshalls, if i recall correctly).
Name and shame the dealership, it has nothing to do with the manufacturer. As another example, when we went to Mercedes (often reported that customers feel a bit.. lets say, undervalued, or snubbed), we let them know that we were looking for a Motability car, already feeling somewhat.. nervous? Anxious? Like we’re.. Beggars, or something. Generally uncomfortable. Until we met “our guy”, who was genuinely the nicest, most understanding salesman i’ve ever met, making us actually feel welcome and valued (of course, as it should be, but often isn’t).
Hell, even in the same dealership you talk to an incompetent knob first, to then get “loaded off” to another guy who knows that he’s doing.
Our current car didn’t go smoothly either (SEAT Ateca 2019), everything went spotless – got a timeslot, got the car in the timeslot (pre-covid, of course) etc – good guy too. Except, when we went to pick up the car (i didn’t fully grasp the issue), he apparently forgot to put our pin into the system. Took them two weeks to figure that out – and if i’m not mistaken, that meant that we drove two weeks without insurance (because we never officially “received” the car).
If a dealer sucks and tries to pull you over the table, shame the dealer – so others can avoid them.
In regards to colour, i’m with Glos Guy. We were looking at the Tig Elegance as well, and would only take it in Dolphin Grey metallic – exactly for the same reason. It’s basically the same colour as the grey plastic trim, making it look uniform rather than the (imho, ugly) two tone approach of all other colours. It’s not too dark for us either (that’s subjective though), and we would’ve considered Nightshade Blue as well if it weren’t for the fact that our Ateca is Lava Blue (same colour).
The brown.. Down to taste, i think. We saw it, and it looks too “pensioner” to us. Very brown.
Prior: SEAT Ateca Xcellence Lux 1.5 TSI DSG MY19, VW Golf GTE PHEV DSG MY23
Current: Hyundai Ioniq 6 Ultimate
Next: we'll see what's available in 2028.