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.

Looks like the same seats as my SE Tech model in the UK but the alloy wheels are different, more like those on the UK S model which I always thought looked nicer than the SE ones that I've got.

No, it didn't have leather, it was Alcantara sort of suede like finish with "leather" sides and pseudo leather on the back of the front seats. Maybe some had leather as an option but my 2013 model certainly didn't.

Must be different specs over in Ireland, certainly no models called Ambition in the UK but Elegance was the old name for what is now the SEL spec over here. If it was one of those cars it would have 17 inch alloys, alcantara seats, puddle lights etc. Interesting to see that the Ambition spec cars actually came with a spare wheel kit as standard, it's been a long time since any cars over here had this. It kind of sounds like an SE model reading what it includes as standard.

Well said, the 1.5 TSi engine is not what you would call a normal engine. Personally I wish that I'd taken the cheaper 1 litre TSi engine than the 1.5 version as no matter how I drive it I cannot get anything like the fuel economy that it had pre software update and it feels kind of flat too. Yet some people with the mark 4 Octavia are reporting really good fuel economy with this engine straight out of the garage, without any great effort. It kind of makes me wonder whether there has been another secret software update to fix some of the problems that the first update caused?

You can't really compare standard petrol engines to similar powered diesel versions. The petrol engine will be quieter, smoother but needs to be pushed a fair bit more than the diesel to get anything like the same performance and most of us who've had diesel cars in the past don't tend to drive that way anymore; hence reason why petrol engines feel that bit slower if you're driving the car in the same way as your old diesel version. I try nursing my current car to get better fuel economy but its hard going since the software "update" which took away at least 10-12% average fuel economy and left the engine feeling a bit flatter all the time. I've had the 1.6 TD engine in an early mark 3 Octavia and most of the time it actually felt faster and more powerful than my current 1.5 petrol engine. Even though that is a lowish power output from the 1.6 TD engine it has a lot of torque once you get it over 30mph; lower speeds driving around town it will feel quite flat if you're in too high a gear, which is quite easy with the cheapskate five speed box and gappy gear ratios. Before the Octavia 1.6TD I had a Mondeo 2.2 TD Estate; definitely a wolf in sheep's clothing with incredible torque all the way through but an absolute pig of a clutch made driving it painful in town traffic.

Car was in mint condition, well under the agreed mileage. It was a terrible deal all round!

Personally from my experience I'm amazed to hear of anyone having even a penny in equity at the end of their PCP agreement! I had an early Octavia 3 1.6 diesel estate in Elegance spec which I ended up having to hand back to Skoda because there was zero equity there, the dealership didn't even want to buy the car off me for the final payment as they could buy cars for less than that on the open market. Trade value was nearly a £1000 less than the final payment would have been, which put me off buying the car at the time. Never taken out another PCP since then, current car is on PCH, which works out less expensive overall. The deal was sold to me on the basis that there would easily be decent equity in the car but the VW diesel scandal pretty much killed the market in diesel cars at that time plus Skoda got their numbers very wrong with their PCP deals in the UK, which made them very unlikely to work as they should work. If I'd had the cheaper 1.4 petrol engined version I'd easily have had good equity because suddenly everyone wanted petrol engined cars instead of diesel at that time.

Pretty impressive to say the least, don't think that I ever saw mpg that good even when I had a 1.6 TD Octavia 3 Estate! My car doesn't seem to do much better than low 50's mpg nowadays and more usually low 40's mpg after the software fix which took about 10% off of its fuel economy.

My car came with this fitted but I never bothered to activate it as it was only free for the first year. I couldn't think how anything that it offered would really be of benefit to me and also I don't like the idea that down the line some bright spark would work out a way to hack into my car via this technology. There are already enough problems with keyless cars being stolen with remote relay technology, keep it simple Skoda!

I'm amazed at your fuel consumption figures, you must drive really, really carefully! I'm down to something between 40 and 50mpg on a 20 minute mainly country roads commute to and from work since my car had the fix. It used to regularly get into the mid 50's mpg on the way to work but that isn't possible any more given the drop in fuel economy that the car has suffered.