kitset

Nope, never heard a peep from mine. Other than the annoying whistle through the bike cables at around 80kms!

Hmm, haven't heard of that being a problem. But I'm in NZ so the car takes literally months from factory to dealer. It takes very little heat to get the glue to move, I reckon I could have done it with the car left in the sun on a hot day! Can't see a gentle heat from a hair dryer or heat gun (on low...) or the glue coming off damaging the paint. It's really easy to do, maybe do it yourself, that way you'll know the person doing it is being very careful!

Yip, that was me! I saw you in the rear view mirror and noticed the black Skoda badge on the white, so much better looking than the standard badge I reckon! I was a little embarrassed at how dirty my car was to be honest...

I think the front looks amazing on both vrs options, but the back is a little "meh". I've got the estate, which I (obviously...) prefer to the hatch, but even the estate looks bland from the back. It's the rear lights that look dated to me. They're almost the same as my old 2004 S4 estate rear lights, a bit rounded and soft. They still look OK (just OK) now, but pretty dated. Particularly when compared to the modern, aggressive, angular looking front of the car. It's like they gave up at the back and just pulled stuff out of the old Audi bin!

Just in case you need some help deciding [emoji41]

I'm desperately trying to ignore my kids in the car. Extra mirrors to see their evil little faces certainly aren't on my shopping list (especially expensive skoda ones...)!

Great summary Orville, thanks.

Google maps is considerably better than the Columbus sat nav, in NZ anyway. But I like the rest of the Columbus / canton set up.

I only add flac files and I think the canton system sounds pretty good. I have the sub cranked to 7 or 8, but at that level I find it well balanced with the system. But as andyvee says, the file format/quality is one of the key things to get the system sounding it's best.

Seems likely it would be the version with mirrorlink (a way to connect content from smartphone to display, don't think it's a good way, but a way never the less!) and smartgate (vehicle info shared to an app on your phone. That's just a guess though!

Apple lossless (.alac) doesn't work sadly. Also, if you've ripped a cd with iTunes, or purchased tracks from iTunes store, I believe album art is not embedded in the music file. ITunes stores all the album art in a folder on your computer and idevices. Easy enough to fix and embed, either with a purpose built tagging software, or in iTunes itself (although that's fairly labour intensive, OK for a few albums).

Bummer! I had a nail in recently (stuck in so a slow leak). The TPMS went off with a drop of 8psi (32 from 40 - I'm on Xtremes). It did it 3 times at the same pressure drop. After 3x losing 8psi over 24h I begrudgingly acknowledged that I needed a trip to the dealer... As an aside, the dealer charged me $35 to fix the flat. I kind of expected to have it done for free, it was less than a 10min job. Many tyre shops do it for free in NZ, on anyone's car. Obviously Skoda make money from servicing, but I thought fixing a flat might have been a freebie. If I'd have known in advance I would have taken it to a tyre shop. My fault for not checking though!

Mine sounds B-pillar, but it's really hard to pinpoint.

My sympathy to you, yes, mines both doors now. Had my car a similar length of time. The rattle started in my passenger door about four weeks into ownership. It started in my drivers door about a week ago. It's really annoying! I've pushed and prodded and can't make it stop so I'm guessing it's inside the door panel. I only get the slapping sound when the windows down a bit so I've assumed that's the window shifting and is normal. I can't be bothered taking my car to the dealer just for the rattle (although I have told them about it), but next time it's in there I'll get them to sort it.

No sign of wear from mine yet. Only 7000km in though.

Hey mate, I met you at the owners day back in November, I'm the other vRS owner who previously had an S4. Happy to hear you sorted the missing button, and a whole new car out of it, score!

Any idea what the noise was? My gearbox (I'm assuming it's a gearbox) makes a strange fairly quiet knocking noise, particularly when cold. Pointed it out to the dealer when I picked the car up. He called the mechanic in who said it was "normal" and something about a bearing. Reading your tale I'm slightly paranoid now...

That's 10km/h faster than is legal in NZ! Over the Xmas holiday period the cops had a "zero tolerance" policy too, meaning they could ticket you for doing 101km/h in a 100km/h zone. Not sure how it would hold up if challenged (margin of error etc.), but that was there advertised approach. But this is another topic, apologies to the OP for the slight thread hijack!

Based on my phone gps and radar detector, mine reads 4km fast at 100km/h. I'm on the 19s, but I assumed the wheel circumference on all the factory wheel/tyre combos would be the same, with the tyre height changing dependant on wheel size. Guess there are small differences though.

Come on, how committed are you? Plus, it's summer down here [emoji41]

Standard on vRS in NZ now, but the earliest ones didn't come with it. The manual TSI I test drove in March 2014 didn't have it, the auto did.

I'm most happy to do it if you're in the Auckland area (sorry, can't tell from your profile). Cheers

Good review, thanks for the heads up. Mildly amused with the reference to sport mode: so you "...can use all its 163kW of power", pretty sure the other modes don't give you fewer kW's! On fuel economy, even on the open road I struggle to get better than 7.5L/100km. But that seems ok to me ('specially coming from a 4.2 V8...). I'm in NZ driving Northland-Auckland and back mostly, so not many straight roads. And the family of four + roof racks probably ain't helping .

I've done (plastidip'd) the Skoda badges on my black vrs, I like it! Ran out of masking tape, but will be getting more today to do the front vrs badge. I'll mask off the interior colours so only the chrome gets the matt black treatment.

Didn't stop me