Geek42

Here's what they look like. As I say, I'd prefer Skoda ones, but I'd be interested to know of anybody elses experience (good or bad) with cheap centre caps or stickers.

Yeah, mine came with Dezent centre caps. They've got ZT2000 written on the back and they're just slightly bigger than the Skoda centre caps off my Teron wheels. Haven't measured them but might guess that the Skoda ones are 55mm and the Dezent are 60mm? I was going to offer you a set for the cost of postage as I had a shipping problem with my wheels that resulted in me getting an extra set of centre caps......or so I thought. I just opened the spare bag and discovered that I've only got 2 extra. Sorry!

Thanks Gabbo, I made all the exact same discoveries myself yesterday morning! Bit of a disappointment that the centre caps are a different size, I have fitted the Dezent ones for now but I would prefer a Skoda centre cap, so I'll get myself on e-bay at some point. I'd be interested in anybody else's experience of buying centre caps from e-bay: 1) Did anybody buy centre cap stickers, did they look OK (which I suspect they don't), and did they start to peel off after a couple of weeks (as I suspect they might)? 2) Did anybody buy Skoda centre caps in a non-Skoda size and find they were just generic centre caps with the said same stickers on anyway?

My advice is to test them. I drove both and preferred the petrol. I calculated that the diesel shoul work out a bit cheaper over the lifetime, but it wasn't a marked enough difference to be the decider. With your mileage there's probably no financial advantage in the diesel (unless you keep it forever). I average around 47-48mpg in the 1.4, it was above 50 for the first 3000 miles but then I got less Eco. Sitting at 70 on a long run it can get high 50s. Doing lots of 2 mile journeys around town it gets as low as 30 although I went into London yesterday and got 49mpg on the trip computer doing 30 miles in 1hr45 mins! The diesel is very refined and pretty quiet at speed, but the petrol's just a bit better at low speed in my opinion. The stop start seems a bit less intrusive in the petrol and I prefer the wider power band. And there's no DPF. My wife preferred the engine note of the diesel though. These are just my preferences, go and try them and see what you think.

Well, I don't know what 'system' driving is, but every car is different. She was taught by her driving instructor to use 3rd at 30mph (nearly 20 years ago!), but the car she learnt to drive in had neither a 6th gear, nor a turbo, and probably developed peak torque at about 4000rpm. I feel she ought to adapt to circumstances more than she does, but then she thinks that I ought to use the "correct" lane at junctions instead of the one with the shortest queue. We're probably both right, but not worth getting divorced over!

Not clear cut in my opinion. Peak torque is supposed to start at 1500rpm, and the car's perfectly capable of cruising at this engine speed. I would say that at urban speeds it's even good for a bit lower than this. At 55kph 5th should be fine, but 50kph = 1300rpm in 5th, so depends on road traffic conditions. I'd say OK under light load, but 4th would be a more universal choice and would avoid changing down for hills and small speed fluctuations caused by the fool in front. My wife will happily sit in 3rd at that speed, which is just downright lazy. I'm trying to educate that it's less hassle to change gear than to have a row about it with me!

That's the basis on which I work, and I will get through them, but if you only do 5,000 miles a year you might find that you end up swapping them on age rather than tread depth and then you would be paying twice for the rubber. Not sure where the cut-off would be. I've just bought a set of alloys (TUV approved and correct size for the vehicle) for £230 and paid less than £60 to have my existing winter tyres fitted as they happen to be the same size as the ones from my previous car. Considering that I bought my Octy used that amounts to 2% of the price of the vehicle, and if you bought new it's less than 1.5% (and you could get steel's cheaper). There was more play than that in the budget when I went to buy the car, so I don't consider affordability a valid argument. I've paid less than £300 to improve the safety of my £15k car. Better value than the dealer's protection pack, the gap insurance, and even better value than the side airbags in my opinion. Of course, other opinions are valid!

I have experienced something a bit like this when stop-start is active. When the SS system restarts the engine it seems to take a couple of seconds to sort itself out, which means that if you pull away immediately it starts to go, hesitates, raises the revs itself (anti-stall?) then settles down and becomes smooth again. Of course, in real time this is quite momentary, and more like the first 5 meters rather than the first 100 meters. It only happens with gentle throttle usage (although enough that it would pull away smoothly if it hadn't just restarted the engine). I don't think it's unreasonable for the engine management to take a couple of seconds to settle after a restart, so I don't think it's an issue. I find it quite natural to cause this though, as the restart occurs on depressing the clutch, and it doesn't normally take 2 seconds from that point to start letting it out again, so quite easy to get the stutter if you don't modify your natural rhythm a little. I find a slight pause before letting the clutch out works, or giving it more revs than normally required seems to override the problem, but it needs more revs from the off as once you hit the glitch there appears to be a momentary disconnect between the accelerator position and actual throttle response as the ECU does it's own thing. This only ever occurs when SS restarts the car though, never under any other circumstance.

I don't understand why this appeals. I want the most linear throttle response that I can get, so I can decide on a continuous basis how gentle or aggressive I want to be. If the sport mode actually made the thing go faster I would use it, but I feel like I'm missing something when I read comments like this. What's the issue with using the full range of the pedal? I know a lot of people like sport mode (and with a DSG it's a different thing), but hitting the carpet isn't exactly difficult. What am I missing?

Mine are going on this weekend.

Does it lean, or is it perspective trickery, being mounted vertically in a dash that is sloping away towards the side of the car, and maybe also towards/away from the driver as well? Might look twice at my maxidot tonight.

Make you sure you check the radiator thoroughly. As I said, when my missus did it the radiator was damaged even though it wasn't yet leaking. I think the quote for all of it was about £1200.

It reminds me of the noise an old car of mine used to make when it failed to start. I think the starter motor wasn't engaging properly and the whine was the noise of the starter motor, which is usually masked by the sound of the engine turning and trying to fire. That said yours started, so not at all the same situation! Sorry.

As JJJ66 says, if you want to be accurate you need to correlate what you put in with what you actually used. The easiest way to do this is to make sure that you have the same amount of fuel in at the end as you did at the start, and the only practical way to do this it from full to full. The error is the variation in cut-off point of the pump. If you do this over 1 tank then the error in the pump cut-off point can be significant, but over multiple tanks it becomes proportionally less significant. Over 15k miles I'd say it's totally insignificant, and you are correct that it doesn't matter one bit whether you filled or half-filled in between, it is only the start and end points that would matter anyway.

My wife also did this, but fortunately it was a small deer (as in, not a young one but a breed that doesn't get very big). I was at home and she rang me to say she'd wrecked the car and didn't know what to do. When I asked what she meant by 'wrecked' she told me it had "split up the middle" which brought cartoon cars to mind, one half turning left and one turning right if you know what I mean. A bit more digging lead her to tell me that she'd cracked a bit of plastic trim that lay between the grill and bumper! I told her if there was no fluid coming out under the engine bay and it drove OK she should bring it home (after informing the police that there was a dead deer in the road). In the cold light of the following day though it became apparent that the bonnet was depressed, grill and bumper broken and the radiator was damaged, although not yet leaking, which put it beyond economic repair as it was old enough to have no real value (and she fancied an excuse for a new one). Main thing is that your missus is OK.

My first car was a Cavalier, and the cambelt was due a change every 36k miles or 4 years. Mind you, it had an engine management problem once and on one day it had a full service, timing belt and new ECU and the whole lot came to just over £250, and that was at a Vauxhall main dealer (a few years ago mind). SWMBO had a Clio not long after for which they wanted £250 just to change the belt, so the Cav wasn't so bad.

Electronic Repair and Workshop INformation service. Online tool giving independent garages all the info they need to service and maintain a Skoda. I bought 1 hours access for a fiver to check the service schedule!

It's a lifetime belt, as confirmed by ERWIN and SUK customer services in an e-mail to me. Any dealer quoting 4 year replacement interval is being a plank (or worse).

Is this thread a wind up? Surely everybody is aware that there are virtually no cars out there that achieve the EU combined cycle figures in the real world. I would say 15% error seems to be a typical sort of value, but I simply can't believe that anybody expects to achieve the quoted figures any more. Loveman, you're yanking our chains!

I would like to have seen you have a conversation with an ex-colleague of mine. He insisted that you could only calculate it on one refill, as you can't guarantee that you top it up to the exact same point, and the errors compound over multiple tanks and invalidate the result. I tried telling him that the percentage error would reduce over multiple tanks, but he wasn't having it, and he was an engineer! One day I told him that you could half fill up, and as long as you'd filled it the tank before and you filled it the tank after it wouldn't stop you doing an mpg calculation. I've never seen a person look that frustrated before or since (well, apart from my 5-yr old lad!).

Agreed, the only issue I've had with timing devices was a chain, on a Mondeo. I bought it used (with 80k miles on the clock) and after about two weeks started to notice a rattle. I had it checked out by an independent who suggested a mis-tensioned timing chain. The garage I bought it from had a look and insisted that it was something else, and told me to carry on driving it until they had a free slot to make the repair. I put in writing my displeasure with their advice and when it died catastrophically a week later they were left with a far more costly repair. I failed to reject it as all the usual helpful associations told me that a car with 80k miles on it can't be expected to be in good condition and my only choice was to let them try to repair it (I was advised that they'd have to fail to repair it at least 3 times before I'd stand a chance of rejecting it in a legal wrangle). It was never right after that, but I kept it going for 2 years without spending a bean on it and then chopped it in, so in the end not so bad. For me anyway.

As already mentioned, it is a long-life belt. Skoda has an online system that I used to look this up (ERWIN) and the official line is that the belt should be checked after 150k miles and checked every 18k miles after that (converted from 240k km and 30k km respectively). No official replacement schedule. More here: http://www.briskoda.net/forums/topic/317272-service-schedule/

My MPG was well down this morning, but that's because I have a very short drive to work (< 2 miles), and it spent 5 minutes sitting on the drive defrosting first. I was walking to the office until about 6 months ago, I should really get back into the habit. Apart from unnecessary fuel use + wear and tear on the car, I'm also finding my trousers are starting to fit less well (or maybe that's because I've started to go to Greg's at lunch time). I can already tell that I'm going to miss the heated front screen this year though. :'(

According to the published figures the manual does 27.9 mph/1000rpm in top gear (6th), whilst the DSG does 33.3mph/1000rpm in top (7th). The low top gear in the manual is a complete nonsense when viewed logically, considering the torque curve of the engine I would like to see top gear in the mid-high 30's mph/1000rpm. It's one of two things I'd like to change about the car, but I reckon it's done this way to keep a strong differentiation between petrol and diesel. Gear ratios designed by the marketing guys...

Well, there are various places that you can go on the web these days to try to find out the real fuel consumption. Honest John's site allows users to upload their own data, so the proverbial pinch of salt should be applied for the fact that there will be a mixture of maxidot figures, tank to tank figures and downright liars, but for both the 2.0TDI and 1.6TDI they are currently showing around 57mpg average. Interestingly there is a bit more spread on the 1.6 than the 2.0 (it goes lower at the bottom end as well as higher at the top end). 72.3mpg is nowhere near either range, so if the OP really did achieve this on a reasonably fast run then fair play, you're an exceptional hyper-miler. I'd be surprised if this can be maintained over the longer term. My last car was a 1.6TDCi Focus and I also got this above 70mpg on a 60 mile run around the M25 sitting at 60mph because it was busy and the fast lane wasn't going much better than the slow lane. The true average started out more like low 50's though and finished up 85k miles later in the mid to high 40's as the DPF filled up and the EGR valve started to arouse suspicion (the DPF on the focus actually did fill up as it used an additive that left an ash deposit that couldn't be burned off - DPF replacement due as a regular service item at 75k miles at a cost of ~£1000!!!). You can see why I went back to petrol.