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Regular bad/ignored helpdesk process at a major corporation. In this case the helpdesk failed to understand the urgency and nature of the situation.

"Volkswagen has a procedure in place with a third-party provider for Car-Net Support Services involving emergency requests from law enforcement. They have executed this process successfully in previous incidents. Unfortunately, in this instance, there was a serious breach of the process. We are addressing the situation with the parties involved"

After reading The Castle, I'm unimpressed.

Omg I worked at a big helpdesk and i would so ignore the process in emergencies. Afterwards I'd have a chat with the team Lead and I've never got penalised for it once. In fact once I even got an official thanks from the company after the customer in question wrote a thank you letter to the company.

This leeway is important. The reason you have human agents is because process isn't everything.

The fact that that didn't happen in this case suggests VW and/or the third party contractor err in the opposite direction and punish initiative. Sure, the customer service rep should have been aware of the specific policy exception in this case, but the fact that they didn't feel like they could help without a specific policy exception suggests a pretty restrictive customer service environment and prioritizes rigid policies rather than helping customers. Or at least that was the perception of this particular rep.
Apparently it was human error. The poor customer service rep just didn't know about the policy that should have let them help despite the expired subscription. I.e. the headline is massively exaggerating the story.
The customer service rep not knowing should not have been the end of the story here. It was followed up by a refusal to help once they were let known. Thisnis a clear case where they should have escalated.
The general problem of devices people depend on suddenly expiring for (unjustified or justified) reasons is getting annoying on a society-wide level (and will get worse unless reined-in).

It's most visibly terrible and abusive in emergency/life-threatening situation but naturally people hate it all the time. The thing is that with emergency situations, the company will logically have overrides available - but because you'll have people often wanting to use "emergency" to get out from the ordinary problem of an expired car/device, the companies will make it hard to claim an emergency, hence some emergencies won't get caught.

And with the modern company organized on plausible deniability, those uncaught emergencies will look like "human error". And so the sycophants can say "nothing to see here, move on folks..."

(2023)
Yes, it's HN policy to put the year on. But for 2023, that seems a bit overzealous, at least for today...
Usually we finesse it for the first couple months of the year, like this:

if the last-year post was only a little while ago (say 3-4 months) then we leave off the year tag, but if it was actually quite a while ago, we add it. In this case the article is from Feb 2023, so it's fair to add the year.

Edit: I thought this story had some major attention on HN at the time but the biggest thread I can currently find is:

Volkswagen briefly refused to track car with abducted child inside until paid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34962563 - Feb 2023 (16 comments)

Yeah, I thought that this was from Feb 2024 at first.
You have got to be a PAYING customer to receive service. Last I checked the cops got plenty of cash!