GainfulShrimp

As I said, if I found it to be a useful experiment, I'd probably hard-wire the power from the fuse box area like I did for my dashcam a while back. Also, it's a few moments less faff every time you get in and out of the car, as @roo pointed out.

Agreed, but my iPhone 6+ is getting to that age now (3 years/generations old) where it's starting to feel slower and more clunky with every new iOS version that's released. And if I'm honest, it's just too big - yet I love the big screen - thus I've been wishing for an iPhone with a screen as big as the '+' variants, in a physically smaller handset. Unfortunately for my bank account, Apple have gone and made just such a phone, at a time when I was thinking of upgrading mine anyway... damn them. It looks to be a different shape to that one, to me? Good idea though, if there was a similar kit for the Octavia, it would be the neatest solution. It's no biggie tbh. There seem to be quite a few options on Amazon for cheap and cheerful non-slip 'ultra slim' Qi charging pads with micro-USB inputs. They're sufficiently cheap that I wouldn't mind buying one to test temporarily with a 12v socket adapter for power. If it worked, the phone didn't slip around too much and the signal-boosting function still worked OK, I could then think about 'hard wiring' a suitable 5V PSU into the fuse box area in a similar fashion to my dashcam.

Thanks @match14. Mine looks like this though (pic borrowed from someone else, found on Google Images): ... but I think I might have answered my own question anyway. Further Googling revealed a Skoda press release about a new option for "Phonebox with wireless charging" becoming available for new cars from Spring 2016. I'm pretty sure mine was registered around that time, so I doubt it could have been spec'ed with that option if it wasn't available to order until then. :(

My 16-reg car has the Phonebox option, meaning there's a rubber mat in the little sliding-lid cubby hole under the air con controls, featuring a symbol of a mobile phone. I have a silly-big phone (the iPhone 6+) so it doesn't fit in there very well tbh, but I'm tempted to upgrade to a newer, smaller iPhone (either the 8 or the X) in a few weeks time, and these new phones are not only smaller but are compatible with Qi-standard wireless chargers. I understand that some Phonebox cubby holes feature such Qi wireless chargers, but as I bought the car used, I've got no idea how to tell if mine features it (without trying a Qi-compatible phone in there, of course... but I don't have one to test). Does anyone know if/how I can tell if I've got wireless charging in my Phonebox cubby hole please - perhaps from the sticker of hieroglyphic option codes under the boot lining?

Thanks chaps. I was a rather unimpressed with the cluelessness of the lass that I spoke to, but I think it was a central call centre type arrangement. I *did* specifically ask that it remain on long life servicing when I first took it to them in April though, so will be reminding them of that. Unfortunately though, there doesn't seem to be any way of me (as a regular owner/driver/customer with no special cables/software) determining whether they serviced and reset it properly: i.e. with long life oil and reset via the proper computer interface thingey rather than just via the dash. I've booked it in, explaining strongly that it should be on long-life servicing and that it needs a long life service, which I think hope she added to the notes for the booking. When I drop it off, I'll be sure to talk to a technician or manager from their service dept, explain the whole sorry tale and try to make sure that the message gets through!

Thanks @Awayoffski! That's helpful and the link you posted gives a bit more info on the differences. I certainly tick the boxes/bullets it gave for variable servicing: That's me lol!

My 16-reg Greenline 1.6 CR Estate is asking for an oil service in 100 miles time. It's on the variable service interval scheme. I quite like the idea of this, as I do relatively high mileage (about 30k per year), and taking it in 3 times a year seems a bit of a drag tbh. Its last service (first since I owned it) was done - at a main dealer - in mid-April this year, when it had done 18.8k miles. It's now done 28k miles, which means it's only covered 9.2k miles and five-ish months since the last service was done. (The app tells me it had some sort of check at around 4k miles, i.e. shortly before I bought it.) Anyway, I called the same dealer to book it in and the lady I spoke to said it should be done "every 10k miles or every year". When I explained that it was on the variable scheme and thus that wasn't (necessarily) the case, she seemed confused and just repeated that Skodas should be serviced every 10k miles or every year, whichever is sooner. I explained that even if that were the case for my car - which I don't believe is correct - then it's only done 9.2k miles, so shouldn't be prompting me to service it quite yet. The lady said that was "probably because it wasn't reset properly when it was last serviced" and I should drop by the dealer for them to cancel the prompt. She also asked if the last service was minor or major but I wasn't sure (the digital service record thingey doesn't say), and she wasn't sure either from what their records said. Hmm... I'm not convinced that cancelling the prompt is the right thing to do - the whole conversation didn't give much confidence tbh - but I plan to pop by the dealer in person and attempt to talk to someone who's a bit more knowledgeable before I either ask them to cancel the reminder or service it. Could somebody with any experience of variable interval servicing on these cars please advise how I should proceed? Is it reasonable for the car to be asking to be serviced <10k miles (and < 5 months) since the previous service, and if not, should I trust the same dealer who "didn't reset it properly" to do the next service?

It's probably just bad luck with the call centre rep that you talked to. Some of them aren't sure or haven't dealt with similar queries before, and they are no doubt trained that "if in doubt, try to charge the customer extra". Interestingly, the Co-op are signed up to the ABI's 'Winter Tyre Motor Insurance Commitment', so they've publicly said that they won't charge extra. See the following page for details (and the PDF under 'supporting documents' has the Co-op listed as an insurer who's signed up): https://www.abi.org.uk/Insurance-and-savings/Products/Motor-insurance/Winter-tyres Give them another call and if you get the same response, politely ask to talk to a manager or supervisor and discuss the above ABI document and Co-op Insurance's position on it.

It may not help the OP if he's getting the same trouble with Android devices, but just in case it helps anybody else finding this, my iPhone bluetooth crackling/buzzing/distortion issues seem to have been resolved by disabling the SoundCheck feature (Settings > Music > SoundCheck - deselect it). I'm sure that I'd previously disabled this setting, so I can only assume that a subsequently update to iOS quietly enabled it again... Apparently the feature attempts to dynamically adjust the volume of tracks in your music collection, so that they all sound roughly the same volume. Nice in theory, I suppose - so you don't suddenly get deafened by a very loud track on shuffle if you've turned up the volume to listen to a quiet recording - but the implementation seems to be badly flawed. In my case it caused many of my favourite tracks to distort very badly. Oddly though, the same tracks worked OK on the same headphones, when connected through the headphone socket on the phone... it was only Bluetooth connections which suffered. Bit odd and feels like an iOS bug to me.

I completely agree re: glovebox... a royal pain to get it back in. Did you route the wire along the top of the a-pillar and down the rubber door seal though? I did that myself a few weeks ago based on the advice in this thread, then someone pointed out to me that there's an airbag extending down inside the top of the a-pillar, so routing a wire over there is a bad idea. Your car might not be the same as mine, of course, but it's worth checking. On pages 18-19 of the Octavia A7 manual, it explains that if you've got an 'AIRBAG' badge at the top of the b-pillar, it indicates that you have the 'head airbag system' fitted, which extends all along the top of the windows, from a-pillar to c-pillar. Or just peek inside the a-pillar trim and you'll see the white concertina-folded airbag in situ. Hence I changed my wire routing today, so it now goes along the roof lining, down the side of the windscreen and then between the bottom of the a-pillar and the side of the dash, exiting into the same area to the side of the glovebox. Same difference in terms of a neat install, but doesn't compromise the air bag in the same way.

My Leons both had this feature but it's only with my Octavia that I've done it accidentally (twice now) from inside the house. I can only presume they different key design means the unlock button is easier to activate as it presses against other stuff in my pocket. Either that or the range is better on it, or both. Think I'm going to disable the feature as it's pure luck that my daughter has noticed my car windows all down and asked me about it.

My iPhone (6+, running iOS 10.1.1 I think) has started to misbehave with my Bose headphones again the other day: crackling/scratching almost like a blown speaker sound, especially during certain bass-mid freqs. :( It's bloody annoying, but I know it's a Bluetooth thing because it sounds great when I use a cable. And I know it's the iPhone/iOS not the headphones at fault, because when I first bought them and the phone was running a previous OS, they worked fine. That's the trouble with Apple: it's fantastic when it "just works" but absolutely infuriating when it "just doesn't work"... Just thought I'd mention it as there's no point blaming the car if you haven't replicated the fault with another Bluetooth audio source first.

That's weird. My AFS (i.e. moving with steering) bi-xenons do their thing whether the switch is on Auto or On... But they don't move at all if the Driving Mode is set on Eco. Perhaps that's what's preventing yours from moving? (If you set the AFS lights to Sport - in the Driving Mode settings on your infotainment - they move loads, so it's easier to check that they're working that way.) I have my Driving Mode set to Individual, so I can still have moving AFS lights while using 'eco' air-con etc.

I'm a big convert to winter tyres, living in the middle of nowhere and doing a 35ish mile commute with plenty of untreated B roads along the way. I only barely made it home without a long walk a few times when I had my Golf TDI a few years back. And wrestling with snow chains with an 18 month old crying in the back of the car is not one of my favourite memories. But apart from snow and sub-zero performance, winter tyres perform quite a lot better than summers on the wet, chilly (0-6 degC) mornings that are more common to British winters. I switched to my winter steel wheels (and rather fetching faux-Skoda wheel trims from fleabay) last weekend. I'm using Goodyear Ultragrip 9 (205/55 R16, standard size on my car). It's worth noting that many insurers want to be told when you switch to winter tyres and/or wheels. Some of them used to like to try to charge "admin fees" or similar just for the use of winter tyres a few years ago, but that seems to have improved since the ABI dealt with a lot of negative publicity about the practice. (This year, Direct Line wanted me to tell them when I changed over, but it didn't cost me anything extra.)

Smug alert: my tree-hugging Greenline III Estate got 77.1mpg avg for my commute to work the other day, according to the maxi-dot. I'm getting around 65mpg over a tankful according to Fuelly/Road Trip. But I need a *lot* of road to overtake anything but the slowest tractors on the country roads... so there's a downside to frugality. In my view you shouldn't worry too much about mpg if you've bought a high performance car. And 42mpg isn't that bad for normal driving and a new car, especially if you're not doing many long journeys. My old Leon FR 2.0 TFSI DSG would struggle to get high 30s and I only ever reached >40mpg by hypermiling and taking all the fun out of the car. Most of the time if I hit any traffic it would get low-20s mpg and it was costing me >£450/month in fuel!

Just wanted to thank Great Yeti and Elbow for the air-bag advice again. I've now re-routed the cable down the edge of the windscreen and via the (very tight!) gap between the side of the dash and the bottom of the a-pillar. The wire is still hidden away, so I'm happy. I didn't remove the a-pillar trim completely, but used a trim tool to move the trim enough to have a peek inside the top... the white concertina-folds of the airbag were clearly visible going several inches down the top of the a-pillar, so it was definitely a good shout to avoid routing accessory cables over that area! And thanks Vak for the glovebox damper tip - I'll bear that in mind next time as my trial and error method involved replacing the damper and starting again about six times: a tad frustrating. I'm still quite happy with the camera btw. I tend to forget it's there most of the time.

I had very similar behaviour with my iPhone 6+ and my silly-expensive Bose bluetooth headphones. Certain low-mid frequencies would 'scratch' - a bit like a blown speaker sound and completely infuriating... basically made everything sound terrible. Using a cabled connection, the problem would go away. Also, the same phone (with iOS 9 at the time I bought the headphones) used to be fine with the same headphones. Eventually I followed some advice in an Apple forum somewhere and did all this: - Removed *all* existing bluetooth pairings from the phone (many I still use, but some were leftovers from previous hire cars and that sort of thing) - Rebooted the phone - Turned with phone volume to max with bluetooth disconnected - Re-paired the headphones - When confirmed working, I gradually re-paired everything else I actually use frequently (car, Fitbit, wife's car, etc) I'm not sure which combination of steps above does the trick, but it worked for me. Rebooting the phone alone did nothing, as did unpairing and repairing just the headphones. Very weird! I'm putting it down to a bug in iOS 10 (dunno about 10.1 as I'd worked around it by then). The OP problem could be different, as you say Android devices do the same, but thought I'd mention the above in case it helped somebody else with Apple/bluetooth troubles.

I agree that diesels are slow to warm up. Using the aircon helps a lot with demisting (and keeps it working better than leaving it switched off altogether over winter).

Thanks both. I fear you're correct. In previous VAG cars that I've used with an airbag in the A pillar, there's an 'AIRBAG' badge on the pillar... but looking in the A7 Octavia manual last night, it looks like the 'head airbag system' runs like a curtain from midway up the A-pillar across the top of the windows all the way to the C-pillar (pages 18 and 19 for those who want to check). The notes in the manual explain that the head airbag system is present if there is an AIRBAG badge at the top of the B-pillar, which is indeed the case on my car. :( So I'll definitely need to reroute the cable - hopefully down the windscreen edge down the side of the A-pillar, then across the bottom next to the dash (rather than crossing the top of the A-pillar). Thanks again for the tip. I agree that putting something in the way of an airbag is a very bad idea - both because it'll potentially compromise the effectiveness of the airbag and because you might end up with a wire forcefully thrust into your head, if god forbid it ever activates.

So far, so good, but tbh I've only had it fitted for a week so far. I'm impressed with the video quality but I've never had another dashcam, so can't compare it to anything. It's certainly far better than the majority of YouTube dashcam footage, but you never know how much is lost by the uploading/storing/streaming process, so it's perhaps an unfair comparison. Only minor quibble so far is that it's a bit annoying that the "Hello! Ding Ding Pai!" startup sound doesn't seem to be affected by the volume control in the app (the 'gps connected' Chinese speech can be turned down, as well as the shutdown jingle - it's just the startup sound which seems immune to volume settings)... it seems that it's on or off. I think I'm going to have to turn it off (and potentially run the risk of not realising when it's not starting up properly) because the novelty is wearing thin. It's a minor complaint though, really. It's the video that counts, of course. Now that I have reviewed a decent amount of footage including some taken on bright days, I can see the use in the CPL filter for removing reflections of the vents at the far front of the dash, so I'll probably fit the filter this weekend if I get chance.

It's all relative, for sure. My new Octavia is *much* quieter and more refined in the cabin than my previous mk2 SEAT Leon was. They both had/have Michelin Energy (or Energy+) in 205/55 R16 size, so I can rule out tyre differences in this particular comparison. My winter tyres are noisier than my summers and there's a different characteristic to the tyre noise - again, I think that's to be expected. Tyres do make a big difference and my pre-facelift Leon FR (two cars ago) was noisier still while it still had factory (Bridgestone perhaps?) tyres on it. I'm really enjoying the Octavia (MY16 I think) as a place to drive. If anything, it feels like a less-wallowy-but-still-comfy version of my missus' old Audi A4 Avant - and the Octavia has far more comfortable seats for longer journeys (the A4 didn't even have lumbar support as standard, from memory... rubbish!).

I have a different but related annoyance... When I use Auto setting for the headlights and it's dark, the Auto label on the headlight switch is lit in a really bright yellow. When it's very dark outside, it's so bright that it's actually distracting. If I manually turn the switch all the way to dipped, it's lit in a much more acceptable brightness and green colour. Bit annoying that the yellow 'auto' light seems to be set to "brighter than the sun" intensity even though I've dialled-down the brightness of the dash lights using the infotainment settings.

Cool. Yeah, the cheaper end of the market seems to be improving much faster than the expensive end. The premium brands like Blackvue and Thinkware are now looking very expensive for the image quality that they offer, I reckon. I can't judge the longevity of mine yet, of course, but if I have to replace it in a year or two, it won't be the end of the world.

Which camera did you go for? I nearly went mad trying to choose one as there are so many options and all of them have significant pros/cons...

I've been thinking about getting a dash cam for a while and was inspired to have a go at hardwiring one myself by Aurial's excellent guide. I mounted it behind the left hand side of the rear view mirror. It's just to the left of the sensor for the auto-dimming mirror, so doesn't block the sensor. Thankfully it doesn't seem to have affected the auto-dimming at all (the small size and lack of built-in screen probably helps). I bought a set of plastic 'trim removal tools' to safely remove the plastic panel at the side of the glovebox. The same tools very also useful to help push the cable into the gap at the top of the windscreen and route it along the top of the a-pillar and down the rubber seal to the panel at the side of the glovebox area. I bought a DDPai hardwire kit designed to work with this camera. It apparently has a (non-configurable) low voltage / battery protection feature, but I wired it in to a switched live fuse (rear wiper) as per Aurial's guide, as I didn't really want parking mode anyway. In total, it took me about 30 minutes to install and it was pretty easy. The only slight trickies were: Replacing the glovebox - reattaching the little arm at the side was a pain and it kept coming off somehow as I tried to reattach the glovebox. Now I've done it once, I'm sure I could do it again easily enough. Crimping the add-a-fuse connector onto the red wire from the hardwire PSU/kit. It would be easier with a proper crimping tool, I'm sure, but I used what I had available... which didn't include a crimping tool. Here are some pics of the finished install: It's quite subtle-looking and despite the red ring around the lens; you struggle to make it out from outside the car, especially on a bright day like today: Another shot from outside the car: Side-view of the install. It's quite discreet despite the slightly 'bling' shiny deep purple plastic casing. My wife didn't notice it from the front passenger seat until I pointed it out. Another shot from the side. There's only about 5cm of cable (inc plug) visible after the install - all the rest is hidden: You can't see it at all while driving really - you can just see the top of the mount and cable: I'm quite pleased with the end result and the quality of videos from the M6+ are very good imho. I ordered a CPL filter with the camera but haven't installed it yet. If you're interested to find out more about this camera, there's a good review of the DDPai M6+ by Techmoan on Youtube. It's perhaps worth mentioning that mph speed overlay is now available as an option (I don't think it was available when Techmoan made his review video). You can also turn off speed overlay altogether if you don't want it on your videos. I can post/pm Amazon.co.uk links to everything I ordered, if anybody wants them. Total cost was about £130, including the hardwire kit, add-a-fuse thingey, trim tools, etc.