AllanDJ

I'm around 6 ft 1, plenty of headroom inside the Yeti but they probably made the seats a bit smaller to make the car feel a bit more spacious inside as the Yeti is by no means a big car. Saying that some cars are worse, I had a Saab 93 for a while as a hire car years ago after an accident; it felt like they'd chopped off the front part of the seat somehow, with very little support for the underside of your legs that were left dangling!

I had a Yeti L & K up until last March, nice car but not very comfortable seats; I always felt that I was perched on top of the drivers seat rather than sitting in it. They always seemed a bit too small for comfort but guess that depends on your height etc as to what is comfortable. The seats in my Octavia are much more comfortable than those in the Yeti ever were and those are just plain SE spec seats at that but with the one essential extra of heated seats!

A broken spring is far more likely, I had that on several occasions when I had a Ford Mondeo Estate years ago. Both front springs broke within warranty period but Ford refused to even consider any goodwill payment for them, even though there were clear signs of bubbles in the metal where it broke. When a spring breaks you will certainly know about it but afterwards it is possible to drive the car for a while fairly normally depending on how the broken parts are touching.

To be fair the fog lights are awkward to use, I'd far prefer a separate switch to put them on and off. It would be pretty easy to leave them on by mistake but can't say that I've ever seen that particular warning. Although the Front Assist warning regularly goes off when it picks up someone on the other side of the road on a country road that I drive to and from work by! It was pretty bad on my first Octavia mk 3 as well.

Definitely something different about the engine setup and/or software in the mark 4! I've got the same engine in my 2019 mark 3 car and no way would it give me anything like that sort of mpg. It had quite good fuel economy initially until the garage gave it the software update to fix the roughness in pulling away in first gear, afterwards it lost at least 10% average mpg and has been that way for more than a year now. Garage weren't interested as apparently the engine was operating within normal parameters and just ignored me.

I've only driven one car that had side steps and that was a Landrover Freelander my Dad was test driving many years ago. It looked quite good but in reality it made the car very difficult to get in and out of easily, maybe that was because I'm fairly tall but no way would I have that on any car that I owned. I had a Yeti for two years and found it pretty easy to get in and out of it as it was.

The VW Golf Estate isn't even close to what the Octavia Estate can carry, couldn't really comment on the Seat. Essentially the Octavia is just a stretched Golf but if you've ever looked at a Golf closely, it has far less space in the rear than an Octavia, both for passengers and for luggage. It just depends whether you need all the space that the Octavia has. I find mine very useful, there isn't much that I can't get into it! I added the variable load floor as an option on my car as I found it a handy way of keeping the boot area tidy by putting all of the odds and ends underneath the floor area.

When I had a 1.6 TD Elegance Estate it came with 17 inch alloy wheels, pretty sure the hatch version had the same wheels too' not sure about the 1.4 TSI version though. The 16 inch wheels I have on my current car are actually easier to live with than the 17 inch wheels were as the car suspension seems much more comfortable somehow. I don't think Torsion Beam plays well with larger alloy wheel sizes.

The SEL/ Elegance models come with 17 inch wheels as standard, nice spoked design, only the S and SE models should have 16 inch wheels out of the factory. Plenty of compatible wheels that will fit your car both from Skoda and other makes, it just comes down to what you want to spend really.