Ttaskmaster

There's a free workshop manual here, with a fair few diagrams - https://workshop-manuals.com/skoda/octavia-mk1/chassis/technical_data/technical_data/ Might be a good starting point. I don't know of any Spanish version, I'm afraid, but your English seems pretty decent.

You could put some nails through it, so it gives better grip on the ground like running/golf shoes... Better yet, sink in some threads and screw in some football boot studs. On the reverse side, chisel or route out a recess, into which the jack foot will fit perfectly and reduce the chance of slipping.

Yes and yes.

Power window works fine. Puddle light microswitch was replaced with a new one. Even the connectors to the boot mechanism showed good continuity.

I did not and no longer have the time to mess about ripping everything apart. Just resigned to using the key like it was still the 1980s. Do let me know if you ever figure yours out, though...

Dunno about you, but all three places I've used round here for MoTs either have a car lift or a pit which they use to inspect the underside....

Haptics like that only tell you what you're already pressing, which is no good if you're trying to find something without looking and avoiding actually pressing that control. There is a reason why even fighter jets still have physical controls. They once trialled flight sticks that didn't move, they just read the degree of force being applied to the stick and translated that to a scale of output... but it was found that pilots needed the feedback from actual movement in order to make sense of what was going on.

Touch screens in general just suck. It's one main reason I won't be buying an EV any time soon, and every single day it gives me reasons to hate Smartphones. They are brilliant when used alongside physical controls, but as the sole interface method, they just make using anything an utter ballache. So much for tech enhancing our lives.

I once had a bit of a problem with pedals momentarily sticking around the 3/4 return stage. Turns out the floor mat had come loose and worked its way forward to the point where it was slightly catching the pedals! Possibly nothing to do with your issue, but worth just checking before you spend ages ripping the car to bits....!

If it's a lovely example, those tend to be kept. I suspect it's more the "It's a VRS, innit" crowd that rag it to feck and knacker it to the point where it's no longer a lovely example. My own Octy is worth maybe £500-1,000 in current condition, but it's treasured and so it gets parts bought for it. OEM parts pricing often makes no sense anyway. For example, Yamaha charge £15 for a left wing mirror but £78 for the right one, which is more confusing when neither are the ones with reverse threading. They also charge way more for Vmax indicators, even though they're the exact same part numbers as those used on other bikes.

No insight, but the MkI VRS is still a highly sought vehicle, especially places such as Briskoda. If people are after the cars, presumably they'll be after the parts and Škoda will see that stock is still shifting, so won't yet slit the throat and sacrifice that particular cash cow.

Exactly. My bike will probably never get ridden again, as the carb diaphragms will just be ruined by E10.

All depends what you're using it for, really, and it's an age-old internet war over Red vs Blue. Intel will be 'better' in some roles, while AMD will 'destroy' the competition in others... and each different CPU has its own merits. AMD have upped their game recently, to the point where they are now matching and sometimes beating Intel on performance, rather than undercutting with much lower prices for a bit less performance as they previously did. This is one reason why they're so popular. While AMD are often better in performance benchmarks, I think Intel still have the edge in actual gaming. Their architecture is a bit older, but more refined and generally higher power. It also depends what the particular game is optimised for. Very few make full use of hyperthreading. A friend of mine is one of the top overclockers as well as a heavy gamer, and he quite happily runs a 10600K with a 3080 in his main rig, getting steady 60FPS playing Cyberpunk 2077 in 4k with very high settings. I run a 5960X and 980Ti in 1440 and get around 80FPS. 60FPS is generally reckoned to be a good minimum for modern games. There are a lot more things that go into the games and lower frames can make them look quite janky as a result.

As above - No, not regularly, but definitely one of the first things to check if you're having problems, especially if you've upgraded some components... which is unlikely, being a laptop, but not entirely impossible.

I agree. Power has let me overtake potential trouble, but never gotten me out of trouble... Instead, awareness and good riding have always kept me from getting into it in the first place. The only times I've had actual trouble was when I've been stationary and no amount of power would have helped. I try to apply the same to my driving, but there's only so much you can do with a car.

They keep trying to implement stuff like this and, thus far, have been told exactly to which off they should **** . Last one I heard about was a device that detected engine revs and cut the power on a motorcycle, meaning that whenever you opened the throttle to power out of a corner, the bike would instead just go dead.

Do you have some strong magnets around, somewhere? Perhaps disassemble an old pair of earphones and use the little magnet from that, glued to a piece of string?

If money really was no object, I'd be buying more than one car, for sure! Most of them would be quite unusual, collectors' types, and likely heavily customised if not complete bespoke builds, such as the Pontiac Trans-Am Firebird done up as KITT, or the 1980s Aston Martin V8 Vantage (Volante, or more likely hard top) complete with functioning James Bond kit. But money-no-object for a daily driver? That's quite a tough one... There are so many things I like about driving my L&K Octy 1, that I don't know if any other car could match it without losing or compromising features somewhere along the line.

I expect people are also over-reliant on the 'safety tech' to save them.

I quite fancy one of the cars in Cyberpunk 2077, with all the tech-laden dashboards. If Electric Cars looked and sounded like those, I'd buy one in a heartbeat!! However, that's just a computer game and I suspect the reality would be a GDPR (or should that be CDPR? ) nightmare of clicking to accept cookies and spyware and permissions and all that, just to get the window wound down!! Nope. It just means that people cannot be trusted to drive a vehicle themselves, meaning we need to bring in self-driving vehicles... meaning companies (headed by MPs' mates, of course) supplying all the tech and programming will get the government contracts, **** it up and leave us worse off than before, but by then no-one will be around who still remembers how to drive a proper car, so we'll be stuck with renting mindless conveyor-belt boxes.

You can do a reg search on Parkers for some basic info, possibly including the trim level. If you already know what trim you have, Parkers usually details every option for every trim. Search example: https://www.parkers.co.uk/skoda/octavia/hatchback-1998/19-tdi-pd-laurin-klement-(130bhp)-5d/specs/ Trim example (select from drop-down): https://www.parkers.co.uk/skoda/octavia/hatchback-1998/used-review/practicality/

OK... did you want fries with that?

That's my biggest concern/annoyance, really - Being forced into something I really don't like, for the sole purpose of funding someone else's offshore retirement fund... well, that and how every EV owner I've met seems to have become a militant environmentalist, especially the ones that used to drive very large diesels. This new charge/tax concept is almost a source of amusement, as they'd previously been trying to sell me on EVs by asserting that they were 'free' to run.... I wasn't trying to suggest that, as I'd have no choice anyway. It's more the idea that I'd have to get expensive mods plugged and plumbed in just so the government can double-bill me and collect data.

Can I not still discuss the matter? As I've mentioned before, I'm surrounded by the topic every day at work and in pretty much every meeting we have. How this might change vehicle ownership and use will impact me quite considerably, so its progress is of interest to me, even if the politics and practicalities don't necessarily...

I only got this Škoda Octavia because it was either going to me for free or going to the scrapheap due to busted engine mounts and the PO didn't want to spend any more money fixing it. My previous Merc cost £550, and I've never spent more than £900 on a vehicle. £10k is house deposit money, and we're nowhere near that yet! As above, my point is that (aside from it not fitting almost all of my requirements) EVs are still way too expensive for people like me to switch over... and public transport is not an option, so we'll be left with ICEs retrofitted with whatever CAN bus-scrambling tracking junk they come up with... probably selling my data to Huawei, while they're at it.