SwissRob

Hi @Jed69 - Yes very nice feeling black carpets. Although the dealer claimed that he supplies his own and that none are supplied as standard, they appear to be Skoda or at least perfectly fitting with the Skoda-style press anchor points to keep them in place. On the driver's side it has the "SUPERB" logo in silver-grey. The passenger carpets are all black with no logo and black edging. I had bought a set of "luxury" carpets from SuperSkoda in black with black edge binding and SUPERB logo. The supplied ones seem to be identical as far as I can see. I don't know if the SuperSkoda ones have the logo on more than just the driver's carpet (still unopened). I will keep them to swap out - perhaps when I am cleaning the ones that are in the car now. I'll probably get rubber mats when winter is approaching to save the carpets. The originally supplied boot nets are all black and seem to be otherwise identical to the silvery ones that I had bought from SuperSkoda. Also these remain unopened. I am toying with the idea of reselling them (maybe to a work colleague - many of my colleagues have Octavias and there is one other Superb). All the best, Rob

Surprises for me: The boot nets are included! (Rats! I bought some in advance!) There is an emergency warning triangle The multifunction box was included I didn't order connectivity (MY17 spec) but it seems to be provided (MY18 spec) I DID order dealer-provided complete winter wheels but he forgot them :-) so will collect them late autumn Surprises for me: The boot nets are included! (Rats! I bought some in advance!) There is an emergency warning triangle The multifunction box was included I didn't order connectivity (MY17 spec) but it seems to be provided (MY18 spec) I DID order dealer-provided complete winter wheels but he forgot them :-) so will collect them late autumn ANOTHER SURPRISE The Skisack is also included. I didn't order this either.

Hello chaps Finally took delivery of my first new car for 31 years! Superb III MY2018 2.0l TSI 220PS DSG6 Black Magic Pearl effect Beige interior 4 year / 120 000 km warranty Options (my poor translation and guesses from Polish) WQ2 "Style Plus" 1D4 Deployable Trailer hook 1N7 (Progressive steering) 3GN (Variable double floor) 3LE Garbage bin 3U7 Automatic boot cover release with multifunctions holder 4V1 Electrically adjustable passenger seat 5XH LED lighting C42 EU ABE (?) EM1 Driver Fatigue Assistant KA2 Rear camera NZ4 Private emergency call PFC DCC with Drive mode select PH0 Electric Panorama Roof PH2 Climatronic PJ9 Sirius 19" alloy wheels PK7 KESSY with alarm PK9 ?Canton? PKL Rear 230V, 12V USB iPad/iPhone holder PL1 Leather seats PKV Heated front screen PKY Acoustic side windows with Sunset PLE Leather multifunction steering wheel with paddles PLG Adaptive Cruise Control PNF LED Pack Ambient LED lighting, LED interior lighting PNG Smart Light Assistant, LAne Assistant, Blind Spot Assistant PPA ParkAssist PWD Travel Assist QV3 DAB RAG Columbus YOY Care Connect 1 year + Infotainment Online 1 year Surprises for me: The boot nets are included! (Rats! I bought some in advance!) There is an emergency warning triangle The multifunction box was included I didn't order connectivity (MY17 spec) but it seems to be provided (MY18 spec) I DID order dealer-provided complete winter wheels but he forgot them :-) so will collect them late autumn I will provide pictures as & when I can. I AM VERY PLEASED with the first 180km! Rob

@Zenbasses, @freelunch, @BillyJim @Rifleman All: many thanks for your inputs! I have now several large (128GB, 64GB) SD cards, 64GB USB sticks and have now converted my Storage Area Network music collection (.WAV and .WMA) to .flac, I have pulled metadata off the internet with freedb, have Media Monkey Gold [MMG] and Exact Audio Copy [EAC] as converters. EAC is very slow to rip but uses an online database to correct the ripped CD so it is bit-perfect and it gets metadata. It can also do the flac conversion and delete the WAV original. MMG is very powerful: have bought lifetime updates (=Gold). I love its conversion algorithm that makes use of multiple CPU cores to multi-thread the conversion. I run conversions in parallel. My CPU has 8 cores. Have converted about 600GB of WAVs. I will have to be selective about what goes on those cards. The most tedious part has been correcting the metadata. For some reason, my original rips have often not correctly extracted metadata for the first track so have corrected these semi-manually with Media Monkey. Perhaps this lay with earlier versions of Windows Media Player. Anyway I will never use Windows Media Player again. Have almost finished converting >800 CDs on disk and will spread them over at least two SD cards. Only one level of directories: \<Artist> <Album>\*.flac Queen of the Music (handbag/shoe specialist, aka TGBITW) will accompany me on our first drives and we will see how we fare. I have a company iPhone (and am an Apple atheist) so can't/won't be using that or iTunes with any music functions. Conscious of freelunch's experiences, I am going to keep an eye on the behaviour with the Columbus display and see whether I can (or want to) live with how it performs. I will let you guys know what works/doesn't work for me. Again: many, many thanks for all your knowledge, help and encouragement! Rob PS. We pick up the car tomorrow, 9th August 2017!

Hi hpoom - Gizmo is right! it's quite addictive. I watch a lot of detailing videos on YouTube (sad, isn't it?!) Some of my favourite channels are https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4lRohBzY20wjsFGWS0Jzg Forensic Detailing Channel - UK-based - professional detailer - has a very systematic approach https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCes1EvRjcKU4sY_UEavndBw Chris Fix - US-based - mostly about DIY maintenance but also detailing https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYsa8SOy3TkoxI5D17s1u-w AMMO NYC - US-based - excellently filmed channel very good tips & insights - Professional detailer https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT8-J2yhQX_welyA0U8nHTw Swissvax HQ - Swiss-based manufacturer with expensive but good products - also professional detail service https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa25HDrcr4O_c1GZtUp88LA Detail King - US-based detailer - good tips - Professional detailer https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_oGAplgUK5fiMLzMruPXGQ Auto fetish detail - US professional mobile detailer - good tips on detailing and business https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFjVBSAfPGjTNsEhjaBG01A Car Cleaning Guru - UK-based - Professional detailer - good tips and hints - I love his accent! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE0kcuDlwjfP2982jVH6WkQ Pan the Organizer - Bilingual Québecois - good tips & hints - I love his French! Here the Meguiars distributor does courses, as does Swissvax. They're not cheap, but I'm sure you get solid advice and instruction. I'm toying with the idea myself. For my eldest and middle daughters I have put together a "minimal detailing kit" for each and spent half a day with them showing how to go from a dirty car to one that looks better than most (especially at its age). We wash the outside, wheels, wheel arches, clean detail the engine compartment (has to be done in Switzerland for every MOT inspection), boot and door spaces then vacuum and detail inside, clean the windows and mirrors. The minimum kit includes Lots and lots of microfibre towels Two wash mitts (bodywork and wheels) A roll of paper towels Wheel brushes Detailing brushes (cheap paintbrushes with duct tape round the metal parts) Nitrile gloves A plastic bag to put the used tools until they can be washed out and dried Turtle Wet 'n black tyre black Nigrin Evo wheel cleaner (I haven't yet found better) Nigrin cockpit spray for use with detailing brushes and microfibre towels Car wax Glass cleaner Silicone for rubber parts I'm sure I have forgotten a few items! If any scratch removal is necessary I do this part myself or show them but don't give the polish container. (My father once polished a car down to the undercoat in places, thinking he was doing a great job)! Unfortunately, until my house is built, I am living in a rented apartment so I have to make do with high-pressure wash boxes and cannot control every aspect as well as I would like. I emphasise that the best wash is a no-contact wash so encourage as much pre-wash activity as possible, keeping contact to a minimum. Even baked-on insects come off with a water jet after a good soak. As a motorcycle rider since 1978, I was able to start detailing on smaller (but more intricate) vehicles and extend some of those practices to cars. Luckily my cars don't have wire spokes that need regular polishing! I hope this has been useful for you. All the best, Rob

@Zenbasses Your regime sounds good to me. You are lucky having a good detailing shop nearby - my nearest seems to be a 35-40 min drive away. I think I'm a sad old guy too - I get my kicks watching car cleaning videos on YouTube! All the best, Rob

Hahaha! I laughed out loud when I read that! I have designated my shoe/handbag consumer as "Queen of The Music" - it's a title she likes so much that she will overcome all difficulties to be worthy of (OK, while still complaining). (N.B. Churchill once said that "Sentences with the preposition at the end is something up with which I will not put"! so I rewrote the above )

Hi Xaime - that would be great if it does! Thanks for adding that. Can you test it and report your findings? I will experiment also - but I don't have the car yet . All the best, Rob

Thanks BillyJim! It was exactly the kind of knowledgeable answer I was hoping for! That's great! All the best, Rob

Thanks Rifleman! I definitely will give it a try this weekend. I take delivery next Wednesday! Happy me!

Help! Batch conversion of WAV files in directory structure to FLAC maintaining source directory structure at destination? Hello people I think I'm slowly going crazy! I want to have my music collection (or a large subset of it) on a memory card (or several) to play in the car. And of course I have already bought SDXC cards and USB sticks etc for several hundred megabytes! I specified Columbus and Canton in my new S3 Estate Style and have read in multiple places that the Columbus reads and plays FLAC amongst other formats. FLAC being lossless and containing embedded metadata and cover picture but nevertheless being smaller than WAV, it seems a great choice for audiophiles on the road like me. However I have not yet found a Windows 10-compatible converter that I can direct to the root directory of my WAV music collection (about 500GB) and which will traverse the source directory structure, recreating the structure on some destination drive but containing FLACs. This way, the FLAC files stay nicely organised and if necessary are quickly accessible with a file manager. For example: /Music/Adele/21/..... /Music/Bela Fleck/Flight of the Cosmic Hippo/.... /Music/Dire Straits/Brothers in Arms/.... /Music/Dire Straits/Love Over Gold/.... /Music/Dire Straits/Greatest Hits/.... /Music/Ludovico Einaudi/Eden Roc/... etc. We do not even need "/Music/", in my humble opinion. I would have thought that this was a basic need for people like me. The only possibilities I found until now require you either to rip the source CD for conversion (perfect bit copies are VERY slow!) or to manually drag and drop the WAVs into an input window. But it seems that the expectation is that they all go to the same destination directory. This seems rather simplistic and has limits to the number of files that can be in any directory. Am I missing something here? Do all FLAC files HAVE TO BE in one directory for Columbus to read them? If so, this is a weakness of the source handling mechanism in my humble opinion. Can Columbus NOT traverse a directory structure like "dir /s" (Windows) or "ls -R" (Linux/Unix) does? I would be very grateful for any input on this topic. (And yes, I think I have read every entry where "FLAC" is mentioned! ) I'm really looking forward to someone knowledgeable correcting my assumptions! And especially if someone knows of a tool which can read a directory structure containing WAVs and send it to a similar or identical structure with converted FLACs! All the best Rob

Thank you for that! It's getting a lot of love - even pre-ownership because it's my first new car in 31 years! I have to buy any car myself - my signature and profile pictures show my 18-year old Ford Cougar 2.5 V6 which looks almost new and I plan to give the Superb the same treatment. This time I've used a parallel importer which sourced the car via Poland. I've saved 22% on the Swiss list price. Before when I was self-employed in UK I had a brand new BMW 525i SEL in 1986 - that was my last new car and I also loved that, but it was RHD and not so easy to use on the Continent. My wife is a bit apprehensive of the Superb Estate's length - we'll see how the sensors and assistants help with parking and maneuvering. I actually forgot to mention two items on the list (will amend it, also to show planned purchases) - a USB-iPhone cable with a right-angle plug and OBDeleven Pro to enable/disable one or two featurettes. I need to get a new Android tablet for OBDeleven so am looking at the Samsung Tab S3. - Ah I can't re-edit the list, the "Edit" link has disappeared. It must be timed. So will add here: Planned: PedalBox+ for when the engine is run-in. I have heard a lot of positive things about this toy.

Hi Chaps So far I've bought the following extras which are not being delivered with the car 2 x Zippered keycases (skoda.ch) 3 x Chrome key ends with Superb logo (Superskoda.com) Boot bumper protector (Superskoda.com) (Fast service) Set of boot nets (Superskoda.com) Set of luxury Skoda Superb mats (Superskoda.com) Boot mat for variable boot (Superskoda.com) Model Superb Estate in Magic Black (Skoda.ch) Skoda Black magic touch-up paint (Superskoda) I hope I never need it! Dashcam 512 (Halfords) Dashcam 112 (Halfords) Towball cover (Halfords) Halfords conical wheel brush x 2 (Can't buy good ones here) Halfords thick microfibre towels x 3 (Can't buy good ones here) Meguiars waffle pattern microfibre towel (Expensive here) Halfords lambs wool wash glove (Crazy expensive here) Union Jack and St George's flags crossed (I'm also British) I think that's all for the moment... I just need the car now Only one more week! Happy me!

Hi all I am finding it difficult to find good detailers here in Switzerland. (Are there any Swiss readers who can tell me what they have found ?! ) The best I have found is the Swissvax headquarters/flagship location close to Zurich and close to where I work. https://www.swissvax.ch/flagship-car-care-center/? https://www.swissvax.ch/flagship-car-care-center/impressionen.php (Webpages in German only) Swissvax products seem to have good performance if conventional and expensive. But they don't do ceramic coatings, "only" wax. I am planning to have the following done by them: - "Posh" wash and windscreen sealing - Paint protection for new car - Leather protection for new car Cost point CHF 615.00, GBP 482.00, EUR 538.00 My current idea is to have this done once a year for the next three years or perhaps revise this if I find a reliable Gtechniq or other suitable product partner. I also have a new tin of Soft99 Fusso Coat Dark which I might try after the detailing to increase water repellency and ease washing. I'm not a bad amateur detailer myself and always learning, so can do 'maintenance wash & clean' to a good standard between professional details. What do you guys think of this plan?

Hi Matt Sounds amazing I can't wait! For the boot lid beep maybe you could turn it off with OBDeleven or VCDS or maybe even a menu option? Sounds like it's worth spending a bit of effort to turn off. I'm thrilled for you with your new car! Enjoy! And looking forward to your posts when you get back home! All the best, Rob

Yippee! Happy, happy me! Many thanks, @Matt_EA888 ! I can't wait! I really hope so! I plan to video and photo-document my collection/handover ceremony and hopefully post on YouTube for all to experience. My dealer already agreed. Should be uploaded sometime after 9th August. Matt - enjoy your new beauty! All the best, Rob

Hi Matt - welcome to the forum! I'm also relatively new and have a MY18 2.0 TSI 220 Estate "Style" with lots of goodies due for pickup in Switzerland on 9th August. One thing intrigues me - I was informed that the rechargeable boot light/torch was not orderable as an option (but it was for MY17) when I placed my order. I'm curious to know if it has become standard equipment or if there is just a fixed light on the left hand side of the boot now. I thought this was such a "simply clever" feature I was disappointed I couldn't order it. So that's definitely a request from me! I would also be interested in pictures of the DCC menu if you have that option, since i have seen conflicting pictures with/without scenic backgrounds for the settings. And I'm jealous you'll make it to the owner's register before me! All the best, Rob

Video the handover experience Well I broached the subject of videoing with my dealer and he said, "Of course you can video the whole handover experience. It's quite simple: Welcome and explain the paperwork Small guided tour of our works - car detailing, bodywork shop, paint shop - so that you know about all that we can do Handover of your new Superb with explanation of the details and going step by step through all the special options Attaching the number plates [in Switzerland I will bring them with me - they are allocated to a person and vehicle - the vehicle can change] Short test drive to explain ACC, etc. Done!" I find that so positive and uncomplicated, I can't wait! So far I have had excellent service with my contact at the dealership (the Sales Director) - every time it is confirmed again and again by the honesty and transparency they practice.

Happy happy me! My car is already in Switzerland, although because of holidays etc. (mine and Sales Manager) I will only pick it up on 9th August! Pictures sent by dealer below: My car was made AFTER MY2018 began but retained my choice of wheels from the MY2017 configurator. Perhaps not all import paperwork is complete at the moment, but at least I have all the info I need to arrange insurance etc.

Indeed. I once saw a TV program about the psychology of the "delivery experience". In the US, a Jaguar dealership had a dark arena where the customer & spouse were led into a pitch black delivery arena. Then the dramatic music started and the show-effect dry-ice fog filled the room to 12"-18" depth then the spotlights... And at the end, the customer could lift the veil on his new purchase. 1000% impressive of course. Then the respectful introduction from the sales rep, and the opening of the door to outside & daylight so he could take his new baby home. I mean, WOW! I've never seen that topped, but think many dealers could learn from it. Who wouldn't want to experience that again?! The second time I'd invite more close family. Repeat business practically guaranteed for a hundred bucks each time. Money well invested. So I'm curious what my dealer will offer (knowing that the Swiss are low-key). But nevertheless I could at least record the handover, and maybe my going through my planned acceptance procedure checking that all of the spec requested is also delivered. And at the end of the day driving off into the sunset in a brand-new shiny Superb. Oops - is my marketing background showing?!

Video of pickup or walkaround video just after? Just an idea - why not video the whole collection experience? And I'd certainly appreciate a video walk-around from others - so one could get to see particular features "in person" before receiving one's own vehicle. I'm certainly toying with the idea of doing that with mine (pickup August 9th). I'll upload to YouTube, but Vimeo is another good platform. What do Briskodians think about the idea?!

Yes: my Swiss dealer told me of a two-week window where the whole Volkswagen-Audi Group ordering system was being changed over to new software and during which period he could not change the order for the rims I had ordered (no longer available in MY2018). I think it was something like week 24 & 25 or week 25 & 26. I hope this corresponds to what your dealer told you. New software is seldom perfect so maybe they have had an interim update to fix a few things...

Oh yeah! But originally I was quoted 8 months' wait because of all the goodies so am pleased it will only have been 5 1/2! And a MY2018 to boot!

Wow! That is customer friendly! At the moment I have had to initiate every contact with my dealer (VonRotz AutoWelt in Wil/SG, Switzerland). My contact is excellent (Head of Import Sales) but VERY busy. Feedback is excellent on them but I think they could improve further.

Good for you! Fully understandable! Crossing the company car park today saw a new MY2017 L&K with brown leather interior that I've never seen before. I resolved to take a photo of it at lunchtime. Unfortunately it had already gone. It was very similar to my 220PS "Style" with loads of goodies. But mine is MY2018 (yesss!). Coming in 6 weeks!