Leaderboard

Good morning all, I have an update on my burnt seat debacle... After 6 weeks of intense to-and-fro emails and phone calls with Skoda UK and DVSA, I have finally had my seat repaired with a new cover, padding and heating element at no cost to me! The work was carried out to a high standard by my local dealer, Marshalls Skoda of Barnstaple who have been very helpful. The moral is never give up on a worthy cause and be sure to use key words, which in my case were the words "fire" and "health and safety" -- no one expects their vehicle to present a fire hazard, whatever the vehicle's age. Kind regards, Kevin Pallett.

Agreed but it was the Con/libs who trebled the fees in 2012?

This might be of use to anyone thinking about changing their moderately hopeless Dueler HP Sports to something better. It goes without saying that the decision to fit all-seasons instead of the standard tyres - what to get, mainly - involved many, many hours of careful research, most of which was undertaken while sitting on the can. Comfortable, to a point, and no distractions. "What are you doing in there?" "Looking at car parts. Just looking at car parts." First thing was whether or not I should go from the stock 225/45 19s to the other 'Skoda approved' size for this car; 245/40 19s. Benefits were mainly getting more rim protection as you can see on the pics, and a greater range of offerings than the measly choice of 225 alternatives, as well as the fact that on average the bigger section tyres were cheaper. Potential downside was that most of the bigger ones were extra load 98s rather than the Dueler's 92 and the consequent implications for ride quality. Not that the Duelers were particularly noteworthy in this regard anyway, though they were somewhat better than the skinny 225/40s fitted to smaller-engined Karoqs with 19" wheels. I didn't want to change wheels. I like these Sportline wheels. Yes, they are vulnerable to kerbing damage, and their size means having low-profile tyres, but I can live with that. I bought the car because I liked the way it looked, wheels and all. If I'd bought something for purely practical reasons I wouldn't have bought this car at all. My heart ruled my head. Slave to fashion? Sure am. The Turanza All Seasons I did choose in the end are in the bigger (alternative) size for this car. Thoughts after a thirteen or fourteen hundred miles are as follows: The ride is a tiny bit firmer, but it's barely noticeable. Honest. Part of the dead-legs late night research involved what pressures to use in the bigger-section tyres, the result of which is dropping the pressures by no more than a couple of psi all round, and that probably helps. They aren't any noisier than the stock Duelers except on one short oddly-surfaced stretch of the M42 near Solihull, but since I don't go on the oddly-surfaced stretch of the M42 near Solihull very often it doesn't matter. The wet-weather braking is better than the Duelers, and the dry-weather braking at least as good. I'd had a set of Vredestein Quatrac Pros (225/45 17) on an A3 2.0TFSI before this Karoq, and there was a noticeable drop-off in dry braking on that car with them fitted so I had a yardstick of sorts with which to measure these Turanzas, and they are much, much better. It hasn't snowed (well, it did the other day but I couldn't be arsed to get the car out just to see how they were) so I can't say how they are in properly crap winter weather. Other than that I have no regrets about having spent a not inconsiderable amount of money on four new tyres when there was quite a lot of life left in the Duelers. I was lucky that National Tyres had a special on these Turanzas at the time though, which dulled the pain somewhat. So there you go. A proper no-reservations recommendation.

I like this article too. It's about cars should have some buttons etc, at least if you want a full 5 star NCAP rating EVs seem to be leading the move away from the more traditional button, knob and stalk controls that I love and expect, so hopefully this will at least check their ambitions. Is it just me, or does anyone else like to fiddle with their heater controls? https://www.autocar.co.uk/opinion/new-cars/finally-new-safety-rules-recognise-buttons-beat-touchscreens

There's some rough women round your way!

Today it was announced that it was indeed an EV (Porsche) that started the fire onboard the Felicity Ace in 2022 and lead to it going down with all of its cargo and a lawsuit has been filed against Volkswagen. MOL and Allianz take Volkswagen to court over sinking of Felicity Ace car carrier - Splash247 Felicity Ace

Not really, you can try yanking on the parking / emergency brake, stamping on the brake pedal and if the accelerator is doing nothing and the engine keeps going you might be stuffed. When a diesel starts running on the oil (run away) then it keeps on going, not so bad if the car is on it,s side in a ditch.

And this dear readers is why all handbrakes should be cable operated from a lever to the rear wheels.

Yeah, doesn’t seem too unreasonable for slow, stop start town driving.

I think there's an awful lot of smoke and not much fire over the benefits and problems of EVs. As someone who wants to be left to his own devices, when I feel like I'm being coerced into a change I'm not interested in making, in this instance having to get an EV, I'm inclined to dig my heels in and put up a fight. But right now, we don't have to get an EV. Make the EVs better and more people will want them. Force people into them and there will be resistance. It's never a good thing to force things by law, as laws can be changed. IMO the increasingly frail straws that are being clutched at now, like "tyre particulate emissions", are pretty weak arguments against EVs. Few really care about "tyre emissions". A less densely populated country would solve more environment problems in the UK than EVs ever will, and yet the population keeps growing year on year. NOTE: Skip the video to the 5:00 minute mark and thereafter you'll see a lot of the particulate emission from the tyres.

Oh Lord! If this is reverse psychology, it's starting to work. I'm getting the urge to get myself an enormously heavy E-SUV. 😄 The EV evangelists were annoying, but the anti-EV folk are now worse than them It's like vegans outdoing vegetarians in annoying nagging about how much better everything would be if you just did what they want you to do. And all these grifters like Geoff are raking it in while stirring the pot that really doesn't need stirring. Buy an EV or don't. That's it.

A little OT but I always set alarms and timers to the nearest 5 mins Occasionally I challenge myself and set an 'odd' number. Back on topic, my hybriddiddy has a screen control for the temp and the Jag has big knobs. Guess which I prefer (no smutt please...you know who you are! )

@xman Why the groan icon to my last posting? I am fairly sure that the MSA Blue Book will have revised regulations for the mandatory electrical system cut off of EV's taking part in MSA or FIA motorsports events, 2 decades ago I would have just picked up my bible and quoted them to you. Happy to be proved wrong but I am confident that it will be a mandatory requirement, that the cut off switch or relay will exist on every EV or hybrid used in motorsport so it can not be the technical challenge or impossibility that you believe it to be, whether or not one should be fitted to road vehicles is certainly open to discussion. Actually on the grounds of safety I would be less than happy to be proved wrong in this instance.

I was speaking about the Tesla updates which @wyx087 posted about a while ago where Tesla can remotely access a Tesla and indeed it is mentioned on the "Just Get a Tesla" YT channel as when he had the issue IIRC a broken headlight, and they remotely accessed his Tesla to diagnose it.

I don't think he likes the car. Mr Owen said he has also had another incident where his battery died while he was on the motorway last April - just a month after he bought the vehicle. 'I was driving the vehicle and I had about 100 miles still left and I was literally just driving about 20 miles and I lost pretty much all that charge and car stopped in motorway and I got recovered - it took about 8 hours to recover the vehicle,' he said. 'Everything literally just shuts off. The wheels clamp up because its electric, I can't take the handbrake off.'

And to think that this was 8 years ago, now we have EVs with over the air updates so this is even more possible and it is theoretically possible that even some radio signal etc, could also overwhelm the ECU's and cause glitches with possible highly undesirable consequences?

AFAIA, there isn’t a clutch in the diff; there is one in the Haldex.

Had a day out to West Bay in Dorset today. Sat in the bar of the West Bay Hotel and what pulls up right outside where I'm sat, but: Stunning 😎 Gaz

Much as I love conspiracy theories, the sad fact is the majority of fatal aircraft accidents are caused by pilot error. Insufficient training, knowledge or just plain bad judgement/decision making. Recent exception being Boeing Max and its faulty design. So unless we see more than one example with the same fault, imo it's more likely the driver is to blame. By that I mean 2 Jaguars, or 2 MGs, not one of each. The Jag in the story allegedly travelled at over 90mph for 35 mins on the M62 without slowing, as someone who's travelled that route frequently, I'd say that was impossible. “The speed was going towards about 100mph in the high 90s, going to 100. I thought this was a bit wrong." What an understatement.

You don't understand single point (EV) v 2 point failure (ICE) There is no single point failure that would take out a DSG and an engine in an unsafe way. Would require 2 failures at minimum. Not saying it can't happen, just less likely. I have some experience in this area of design.

Anyway, how many run away EV,s have we in the UK so far compared to oldies flooring the accelerator while parking? That really gets scary when more and more that should not have a licence are driving EV,s Sh-!t happens.

Electric failures. Signals to ECU,s. Off switch not operable. Key Less entry. etc. The accelerators are Fly by wire. No throttle cable. There are Mild Hybrids, soon almost all ICE vehicles with be Mild Hybrid before 2035.

With all the modern tech and internet connection in the car you should just be able to shout "Alexa stop the ******* car" 😂

Once there are more incidents then there might really be a need for more SAFETY as in a CUT OFF device. By then the Self Drive Vehicles will be on the roads and they will need to have a Radio Control system / Cut out roadside like has already been talked about for years to slow down / stop vehicles. Just like Karts at an indoor Karting Track. There has been talk for a decade now about people hacking into cars while moving and taking control of them remotely, and that can happen with EV,s. Then this...

Or a big ORANGE ring that pulls the KILL switch / fuse right under the steering column.

And a kill switch

Blue Tit through the window

This is true sadly. Current Western youngsters are the first generation in a century where they are considerably poorer than us older generation due to the sh1te deal we have handed down. Also The West is on the slide as this Asian, mostly Chinese, century.

Young folk? Those in their forties are still paying student loans back and some will have children at university. so that would now be two generations?

Tell that to the young folk who have to pay for University tuition or those who can't even get onto the property ladder who pay more in rent than a mortgage would cost. They might have a few more technological conveniencies but kids today are financially far worse off than the generations before them. The only generation who are less well off than those before.

By the age of 20, maybe 21 I was driving a Triumph Stag, it did 16mpg and cost 10p per mile to run as petrol had risen to £1.60 per gallon by then. I had just finished my apprenticeship and was a Junior Draughtsman and guess what, it turned out that all we had been told as 16 year olds was lies, my starting salary £3850 IIRC was less than my 4th year apprentice pay! But I still had paid day release for another 4 years, I had been working evenings and weekends as a mechanic, welder, paint sprayer in a rented workshop since 17 years old which carried me through those difficult years, looking back inflation must have been rampant then, petrol going from 73p to £1.60 per gallon and my wages similarly.

Plenty competent places around Edinburgh, these will not include West End, or Arnold Clark.

My hourly pay was 40p when working in a garage before my apprenticeship, a gallon of petrol for my Honda SS50 cost 73p, my pals with their 2 stroke Fizzies etc paid even more. The garage owner berated me for spending close to 2 hours pay on a can of coke and a Mars bar at lunchtime, he was right and it always stuck with me but I had no choice, my mother had died and I was pretty much starved at home, my father kept food in a fridge locked in his wardrobe, there was no way that I could have had a packed lunch. I dont know how much my starting pay was at my apprenticeship but recall vividly that it was a significant drop from my 40p an hour cash in hand mechanics salary and I now had to pay tax and NIC, there was however thank heavens a subsidised canteen where egg & chips cost 11p, sausage egg and chips 21p and first year apprentices like me had a 10p discount so my one proper meal of the day cost me 1p. I also had to pay £10 a week rent to my father, later on he took in a lodger which turned out to be his girlfriends daughters boyfriend and only charged him £5 per week saying he was not eating meals at the house, except he was, that was my cue to move out.

Thats a pretty lame appeal for people to start reading your comments once again, if you asked advice of the network of people who feed you the unconfirmed reports they would surely come up with something catchier? Actually recalling and acknowledging/owning what they have previously said gives someone plausibility. Joking aside I realise the "always" negates my response 👍

We’re currently staying just south of Oban. One thing I have noticed whilst out between there and say Fort William /mallaig/Skye is the number of EV charging points scattered around in “the middle of nowhere”. Possibly more than petrol stations.

Sometimes they do, but he is a click bait merchant that is playing to his audience pure and simply. Always hedging his bets and making silly remarks he can not back up. There is many reasons for many to not have an EV and the expense of running them for those that have not all the benefits of the HMRC / Tax payer help, cheap charging etc is maybe the biggie. All the other stuff, materials, insurance, short life of the battery, vehicle etc is discussed over and over and over. Tyres, Cats / metals, Brake materials polluting is as much an issue with ICE vehicles as Tyres and Brake material is with EV,s.

We are very good at it !😁 Just to give an idea of the average level of our English skills... Though it has improved a bit over the last 10-15 years... A German, an Italian and a French are attending to an English course. The teacher asks to each of them to make a sentence using the 3 words 'pink', 'green' and 'yellow'. The Italian starts and makes a long sentence, using correctly the 3 words. The teacher congratulates him. The German continues with another correct use of the 3 words in his sentence. The teacher congratulates him too. Finally, it's the French turn... He starts having cold sweat drops along his forehead, feels very stressed... And after a loooong hesitation says... Green ! Green !... I pink up 'ze' phone and say... Yellow ? Sorry... 😁

Car in question - Seat Ibiza 1.4 TSI DSG 2010 - 85,000 miles So I had the pleasure of my girlfriends car making a nice clunk noise under acceleration. On further inspection the noise was from the gearbox even at idle albeit quieter. After jacking the car up and driving it through its gears, one of the clutch forks (visible outside the gearbox) could be seen moving side to side when in or out of gear. When force was applied to this the noise disappeared. This confirmed the fault with the clutch and possible further issues on gearbox input shaft failure. The next step was to order all associated parts - clutch, all bolts, all tools and read up on the repair procedure. Once all the parts were here we got to working, gearbox whipped out and oil drained (no signs of any metal fragments which is a good start) and no play on the input shafts from what i could feel. The old clutch pack was removed and inspected (LuK not genuine) so it is not the original and had a fair bit of meat left on the clutch packs so to me it wasnt the oldest thing. Next the clutch release bearings were inspected and although the smaller one was fine, the larger one had fallen apart and all the ball bearings were missing meaning this was running metal to metal and was full of rust! Point of failure detected. I then had to find the cause of failure - First thing to note were no shims were installed at all for clutch freeplay adjustment and also no pilot bearing was installed in the flywheel. The release bearings also didnt match the condition of the clutch assembly. Fault and cause have now been identified - clutch fitted by someone not knowing what they were doing and cutting corners. Solution - new clutch pack and set it up correctly! Whilst here we noticed a few more issues - a small coolant leak behind the supercharger and a split CV boot (a fair bit of grease had left and dirt had entered). These parts have been ordered, but thinking ahead, rather than struggle to get the supercharger out from behind the engine and as the coolant would be getting drained anyway, also it was a pain to get the box off the engine, let alone getting it back in! I took the decision to pull the engine completely which took around 15 minutes. (Anyone wondering why the AC rad and compressor are sitting like that - I didnt want to drain the AC system for the front end or engine removal so they were tucked to the side) The clutch has now been fitted and shimmed correctly - this is done with some fairly precise measuring (down to 0.01mm) and used a depth gauges, straight edge, vernier caliper, micrometer and torque wrench. As well as the maths and equations involved. Engine and gearbox now mated back together and refitted with new coolant pipe behind the supercharger. Just got to wait for the last few gaskets/bolts/CV boot kit to turn up now to get the rest of the car fitted back up. For anyone interested in price - A few garages quoted between £1200-1500 for the complete job. I have done the job (including buying the specific clutch removal/fitting/shimming tools) and replacing all TTY bolts and gaskets for £600. If anyone is interested in buying/renting the 0AM clutch fitting/removal/shimming tool for pre 2011 clutches, feel free to get in touch.

I undid a few screws and pulled out a bit at each end. I also sprayed inside up and over onto the inside of wheel arches etc. That extension wand was useful! Infact it reminds me - I'll have another look see and quick top up of rustproofing of the fleet as it warms up in the spring. One good thing on my Superb II is I don't have the inner wing large sound proofing foam pads(might be because mine is a petrol) - if you encounter those I'd be tempted to remove as they trap moisture & condensation against the bodywork. That's why you see rusty front wings on some ageing VWs and Audis - especially Passats. The old timer is now 10 years old and I've had it for 9 of those years. Looking a lot better than the previous 2003 Superb at the same age which wasn't lavished with the same treatment - I now have more time on my hands as I retired three years ago. Still looking reasonable:-

That has happened in the past, VAG have often had to pay out for damaged clothing and personal injury.

I can diagnose a broken headlight just by looking at it. Or alternatively asking 2 questions if I'm not actually there to see it. Is it switched on but not lit up? Yup its broken. That'll be £140+vat for the diagnostic charge (Evan Halshaw Dacia rate)

FFS .... my life stories and political injustice ranting. JUST GET BACK ON TOPIC!

When i stopped going to Day Release i got an extra £10 a week.

I was on £18 a week as an apprentice mechanic, but also worked on the petrol pumps.... 77 pence a gallon. & had a FS1E. & a 1959 Morris Minor that had been my uncles, then traded for an Anglia, then a Hillman Imp before my 17th birthday.

Just a bit of additional (unnecessary) info on fuse types, the fuse type that can get called "standard" and also named ATO by Littelfuse, who first brought them to the market, the "O" means "open" as in the fuse element is exposed, there is another version of "standard" fuses called ATC and the "C" means "closed" as in the fuse element is covered- I only found that out when I Googled "ATO" to make sure that I had quoted the correct term - so that explains why some of these "standard" fuses, in VW Group cars anyway, are either "open" or "closed" with probably no logic as to why both can exist in a new car from the factory - a supplier related issue maybe.

It was a Voluntary Recall with Mk2 Fabia. A Service / Workshop Campaign, a TPI, yet never a SAFETY CRITICAL Recall with the DVLA / VOSA / DfT. Actually Dealership staff even said, 'Never heard of that'. Many cars still never had the replacement switches.

Yesterday I've Got DEI reflective sheat and mounted it on the front vertical side of the air box close to the batterry because I removed there 1cm alu sponge to have space for the air to go around whole air filter so now I've put this thin one there. Happpyyyy Done by https://www.auto-sac.hr/

Sometimes these people do make some good points, you shouldn't always automatically dismiss what people say based on what they previously said.

Another thought, it might be possible to swap the just the glovebox unit because the new Octavia's are supposedly keeping the 10.25" display for entry level vehicles - although no photos have been released of what that looks like. But as you suggest just because they physically fit and connect, doesn't mean they'll be compatible in respect to software/coding. I'll be keeping an eye on drive2.ru because they do some crazy stuff on there.