mumpsim

Altering driving style can help some people to work around the fault. But I resist the idea that the fault is with the driver or the driving style. It's with the car.

I think that's a bad idea in view of styrofoam being highly combustible. You're aware of the danger from a hot engine, but there are other possible sources of combustion, especially when the styrofoam gets some grease and oil on it. You'd probably get away with it and avoid an engine compartment fire, but if you were unlucky, your insurer would reject your claim.

Which? magazine does reliability ratings based on bigger sample sizes than What Car and also splits reliability ratings into three parts: cars aged 0-4 years, 5-9 years, and 10-15 years. They also analyse the nature of faults and breakdowns and weight them according to severity and time off-road for each fault or breakdown. What Car does not do that. Thus the data from Which? is the most relevant data for my rejection of SurreyJohn’s view that cars older than 5 years are less likely to fail in an expensive way. Some Japanese brands, which start out very reliable, become even more reliable in the 10-15 year old range. That may be because cars of that era had less tech to go wrong. Not so for SEAT, Skoda, or VW, whose reliability starts out mediocre and either remains mediocre or gets worse as the cars age. I am not giving the Which? data in full here as that would be a breach of their copyright.

Percentage

That's right. And since your car no doubt has an alarm, the system must be Thatcham Approved Category 1. That is presumably what the insurance company expects to hear.

Certainly that is true of a service plan. It is not true of a warranty, which like any insurance product lays off risk from the buyer's point of view. Skoda will no doubt make a profit from the warranties in aggregate, but that comes from pooling risk. There can be good reasons not to buy insurance - for example, if premium is high and the likelihood of having to claim is low - but the opposite is true of these warranties: the premium is low when compared to the cost of even one typical repair, and the chance of a failure is fairly high. No VAG products do well in the large-scale reliability statistics (though SEAT does better then Skoda, while VW does worse). In my experience over 15 years that is all untrue. The chance of expensive failures gets greater, not less, as the car ages. And the warranty, if you opt for comprehensive cover, covers everything except wear and tear items. (I speak of Skoda UK warranties, not those from 3rd parties, some of which are poor products.)

Words of wisdom. I agree entirely. We had the Skoda extended warranties on two Yetis and they paid us back several times over. 'Your infotainment screen is not working quite right, you say? Ah yes. You need a new unit. That will be £1,538 for the part. Plus labour, including re-coding and software updates. So probably a bit over £2,000 in total. -- Oh wait, you have the Skoda UK warranty? Fine, we'll handle that for you.' And so on for several other expensive repairs, including some that fail for a second or third time because of shoddy VAG design, such as the 'clock spring'. Comparing what I have to pay for home insurance and travel insurance, on which I have never claimed, this Skoda UK warranty is a bargain.

What premium are they quoting and what excess? Do you get some choice about the excess?

Does the car have a sunroof?

The CrossClimate 3 is produced in the smaller sizes, the CrossClimate 3 Sport in the larger, with little overlap. The CrossClimate 2 is thoroughly superseded. Michelin actually admitted in private that they made a mistake with the CrossClimate 2, at least for the UK market, by giving it superb snow performance at the expense of its grip on cold wet roads. In a UK winter we get quite a lot of the latter and not much of the former.

Yes, that might well be another of the many possibilties. However, I was disappointed to have the engine cut out near the end of a fast 200-mile drive last week, preceded by a fast 200-mile drive 3 days earlier. As always, one person's experience doesn't tell us much, and we've seen no consistent pattern from the experience of others either.

I guess everyone who has been following this discussion for some time (on the long earlier thread) knows it is pointless to complain to a Skoda dealer and get them to investigate, as they will say 'no fault found'. However, if anyone is minded to have the problem investigated, I suggest not using the term 'stalling'. As soon as one says that, people assume driver error. Whatever it is caused by, it is not caused by trying to engage the clutch at standstill with too few revs. There are several outstandingly good VAG independent tuning specialists around the country. They can diagnose faults in depth, far better than franchised dealers. I don't want my car 'tuned' but if I lived near one of these companies I'd be asking them to try to diagnose the fault. On the earlier thread I wrote more than once about having been able to mitigate the problem by 'Italian tune-up'. Now, after nearly a year, I can update my report. Italian tune-up has continued to help, but it has not been a total cure. The engine now cuts out once or twice a month. Before that it was every day or two. I agree with thamestrader that changing down through the gears as you slow down is beneficial. And with his speculation that it could be voltage-related (as well as other possible causes, like a sensor sooting up). The mystery remains and so does the annoyance.

Mostly, no. It is summer tyres that are suitable for only 3 seasons in the UK. All-season tyres are very suitable for UK winters and they do not lose grip below 7C. All-season tyres are sold in Europe (including the UK). All-weather tires [yes, tires] are sold in North America and not here, and are aimed at a harsher winter climate. Tyre Reviews caters for the North American market as well as the UK market. Hence the all-weather tire reviews you have found there. As for the article from Nokian, the URL begins with'na' - that means it's from Nokian North America. So again, the info is not applicable here.

On multi-touch: Google Maps is gradually updating its app to introduce the necessary support. Waze may support it in a future release but doesn't do so at present. So your experience with those is what one would expect: you'll just have to wait. Apple Maps, however, claims to offer full support on iOS 26 CarPlay, so it's unclear why that is not working.

In that case I think your next stop is a good independent auto electrician or independent VAG specialist.

This works on our Karoq, maybe yours too. Also you can try holding down the boot unlock button on the remote control for at least ten seconds to do a reset.

It means they are offering the Bridgestone Turanza T005, a summer tyre fitted at the Skoda factory to many Karoqs. Most people here who have used it regard it as one of the worst tyres ever.

It's not a new tactic, but it is one they have not had to use in the last two and a half years. Then, when we bought our car, Karoqs were scarce. Now they are over-stocked.

That is very revealing. It shows my local dealer, which is by no means one of the biggest, has 28 Karoqs to shift. No wonder they are writing to past customers. Have Karoq sales fallen off a cliff since the electric Skodas started appearing in quantity? Thanks for the illuminating and highly specific answer, which is what I was looking for.

A friend of mine who owns a tyre supply and fitting company says that what sets Davanti apart from its competition is that they charge more than the competing brands for budget tyres of similar quality and spend a lot of money offering all sorts of incentives to independent garages to push their products. That is their pitch to retailers. As for their pitch to consumers, if you bought a tyre with the brand name Ling Long, Sailun, or Jinyu, you would be fully aware you were buying cheap Chinese. Whereas Davanti is a name chosen to make you think, consciously or not, of Italian high performance and so seem to justify a somewhat higher price. But you are still actually buying Chinese, just paying a bit more for it. That's not to say their tyres are bad. They do, however, offer many different tyres and the reviews differ about their ability.

My wife just received this email from the dealer where she bought her present car. It looks like a national marketing campaign in which the dealers are getting some financial support from Skoda UK. Does anyone know the size of the discounts on offer? Is it for PCP only, maybe? We're unlikely to travel 50 miles to find out unless the deals are likely to be exceptional. Normally marketing stuff of this kind goes straight in the trash but in this case we like and trust the dealer principal who runs a family-owned business. "You have been selected by Škoda UK and West End Garage Škoda to receive a brand new manufacturer upgrade on your current vehicle. Your selection means that you have been chosen along with only a handful of other drivers in the region to receive considerable financial support in upgrading to a brand new Škoda or approved used model at a significantly reduced price. Your support must be redeemed between the 8th and 12th August to qualify and is exclusively available at West End Garage Škoda. Please be assured this is a genuine opportunity to upgrade your vehicle and is only for drivers who qualify for this exceptional incentive. We look forward to welcoming you to West End Garage Škoda and helping you drive away a Škoda at a very special price." Any comments? Not on such offers in general, thanks, but on the specifics of this campaign.

Iridium, which is one of the materials along with platinum that is commonly used in modern spark plugs, costs £3,331 per troy ounce at present.

But we are not talking about some dongle you have. Look up the bitrates of the OP's Galaxy S23 and the MIB3 he is using it with.

In case it wasn't clear from my earlier post: since Android Auto requires both Bluetooth and wi-fi all the time it is in use, you can't connect your phone to another wi-fi device at the same time. That means you can't use Android Auto with a MiFi device that connects to 4G if that MiFi device uses wi-fi to connect to your phone. A portable router providing 4G data that connected to your phone by USB might - or might not - work, if there is such a thing. By the way, Apple Carplay is no different, requiring both Bluetooth and wi-fi connection to the car simultaneously.

Android Auto uses both Bluetooth and wi-fi to connect to the car. Bluetooth for pairing and phone calls, wi-fi for navigation apps, music streaming and other things. Bluetooth cannot handle the bandwidth needed for those things. If it were only Bluetooth, you'd get a car screen that updated about once every half minute. Don't get me started on the other limitations of Bluetooth, a 30-year-old protocol that never worked particularly well.