All,

Made some calls this morning.
I talked to Mr. Oudendijk of Pon's Automobielhandel,
the Dutch VW importer, (00 31 33 949944) he was very
suspicious and kept informing where i got the info about
CDroms and all. After i convinced him i wasn't some
intelligence agent he gave me the number of Mr. van Loenen,
also of Pon's Automobielhandel, (00 31 33 4949226).

Mr. van Loenen told me the ETKA system is used by 3 or 4
VW dealers here in Holland. The CD's are made by the same
company who supplies Volkswagen microfiches. Pon has to pay
maintainance for every system that uses this system,
(200 Dutch Guilders, about $120us, a month), every two weeks
they distribute an update on floppy, the whole thing uses 400Mb.

van Loenen says that it's still kinda experimental, the system
should replace the microfiches in about 2/3Yrs. Btw., if you're
interested in buying an orginal orange VAG microfichereader: they
are dealer owned, in other words, the dealers can do with it what
they want, either junk it, store it somewhere, or sell it to you
cheap!

The current version of ETKA was designed for certain countries that
are updated only once a year. VW pursues the idea of having a server
that updates every client automatically every night.

Mr. van Loenen: "ETKA contains the microfiche blow-ups, including
the ones of the K70, T1, 2, 3, 4, and even Ghia's"

All this info doesn't stroke with the message i got from Thomas
Schuster <schuster@mzes.sowi.uni-mannheim.de> this morning, according
to him half of the German dealers are working with it.
Maybe VW is pullin' my leg again...

Brian.