DaveMiller

There’s quite a bit of space to the sides of the basic square floor plan as you move upward (and the plastic “walls” of the side bins come out). Also, the 5-seater has a great depth, from floor to top of rear seat. i suppose there’s no substitute, really, to going along in your Fabia to a dealer’s and comparing the two - climb in and see how it feels.

At floor level: The width, all the way from front to back, is 1 metre The distance front to back is also 1 metre. So a piece of plywood, 1.00 m x 1.00 m would lie on the boot floor. However ... things change as you get higher above the floor. The width increases as you get above the wheel arches, but the front-to-back measurement (I'm guessing that's what you meant by "depth"? Or did you mean vertical depth?) gets rapidly less, because of the rearward-sloping rear seats, and because the tailgate slopes forward.

Sounds like you've found the answer. But what was the question? (Why are you needing steel wheels?)

When I say “jerk”, I mean that I can actually detect the release of the brakes. On the smart there’s a “hill hold” that releases much like a torque-convertor automatic would change from stationary to forward motion: smoothly, with no sensation at all. Both demo Kodiaqs I drove did what mine does - I live with it, but wish they’d improve it.

Love: space, quietness, handling, ease of use, value for money, and the performance + economy are surprisingly good (for a 1.4 petrol in my case) I don't "hate" anything, but on my list of suggested improvements would be: a more settled ride (it feels like it never settles down to a smooth cruise) ability to change the angle of the lower part of the driver's seat (on manually-adjusted seats) a less plasticky feel to parts of the interior release of autohold brakes can be felt as a slight jerk (no jerk at all on my 13-year-old smart car's equivalent autohold)

I was agreeing with you, and assuming that the OP might not know that.

It has to be a (slightly) long press, because a short press just unlocks the tailgate; then, with the longer press, it rises.

All I miss in changing back to petrol is the mpg. A 150-mile motorway trip yesterday, which used to produce 60+ mpg in a 1.6 diesel Superb Greenline, produced 45 in the 1.4 petrol Kodiaq. The sheer bulk of the Kodiaq probably accounts for about half the drop. What I’ve gained is being able to dare use it. Shops, friends, my part-time job and more are all a couple of miles from my home, meaning that on most journeys the diesel would not warm up enough to clear itself. I used to avoid going (it’s too hilly to walk!)

That’s why tax was lower on diesels, some years ago. But science has moved on quite a bit, so it’s the other emissions that are now more worrying - and diesels are particularly poor on the particulates.

Well, yes ... but people rarely have an unfortunate bump carefully.

Or less than one unfortunate bump into something hidden behind?

That’s interesting, thank you. So is the effect of having different lenses (normal, wide-angle, downward-looking, etc) produced in the camera, or electronically, in the head unit? I’d always assumed a composite of different lenses, but that might be old-fashioned thinking. I find the squirt cleans well. I've certainly found the lens dirty enough to need a quick squirt, on rare occasion, but have always then found the view clear.

I don’t for a moment suppose that Montozuma’s camera was the straight equivalent of a £10 camera. It's likely to have included such exciting extras as fitting, wires, connection to power supply, connection to the infotainment screen, and connection to input from steering and bumper sensors, and the addition of squirty cleaning. I recall it was a £350 extra when I bought my Kodiaq, and retrofitting will be so much more faffy than fitting it during construction, so the £542 sounds reasonable.

The “boxes” are part of the parallel-parking assistance. The car won’t steer itself, as it would with the full version of parking assistance, but the screen will show YOU when and which way to turn. I tried it once, when the car was new. Yes, it works, but it seems more faff than making up my own mind!

It looks exactly like the view on my factory-fitted one. The coloured lines should move with the steering and the “buttons” on the right give different views.

But Eileen has the 1.5 150 petrol TSi 2WD

The non-homologated car was the diesel 150PS - Eileen has the petrol TSi.

I believe that businesses are required to do their own risk assessment with regard to Covid-19, and then to implement whatever measures they see as necessary, to keep in with very general guidance. Each business, in its activities, premises, numbers of staff and customers, etc, will be different, so quite what each needs to do will be different. It is perfectly possible for a dealer to say "we are legally required to follow the general guidance, and we've seen a need to sanitise, so it's legally necessary". Others may say the law says follow the general guidance, and that doesn't mention cleaning a serviced car ... I'd certainly expect that where someone has touched my car where I or my passengers may then touch it, they would wipe those parts over with sanitiser. I help out at a motor-home hire place, and we'll sanitise the whole thing, and then not touch it. We'll wear gloves to lay out the hire forms, pen and sanitised keys, the customer signs the forms (and keeps the pen), and they drop their own car keys into a plastic bag which we put, unopened, in the safe. Faffy, but necessary. I'd be suspicious of any car dealer who can't be arsed to wipe at least the door handles, steering wheel and controls.

You've got yourself in a pickle, Keith. Warning: what I'm about to write may annoy you. Take a deep breath and read it carefully, though. It's intended to help you, not "get at you". We understand that you have a problem writing. You need to understand, though, that when you write, people have a problem reading it. It might not be your fault, but it's not their fault, either. It really is difficult to understand you when you don't leave any gaps, when you use strange phrases, when you use punctuation that people don't understand, and so on. Just a small example: a single-dot-followed-by-space (full stop) has a specific meaning, that we all immediately understand, without even thinking. A row of space-threedots-space (an ellipsis) has a completely different meaning, that again we all understand. We really don't automatically know what nospace-twodots-nospace means, though. And therefore our mental process of reading comes crashing to a stop. We can work it out, sure - but that takes time and effort. It's not a matter of "grammar rules", it's a matter of what you write coming over as a dense mass of unrelated word salad. And the whole post seems to be said in one breath, which - strangely - makes the reader feel out of breath, too. OK, so you find it difficult, but unfortunately it comes over as bloody rude. If you walked up to a stranger in a pub and spoke like that, two things might happen: at best, they just would't understand; at worst, they'd punch you in the face. We can guess that that's not what you intend, but you need to realise that. You are taking people's comments as negative, when for the most part they have simply said, in a notably polite way, that they can't understand you. You've then gone on at enormous length on stuff that actually has no bearing whatsoever on the problem you have with the towbar. Yes, you're expressing your frustration - but that becomes frustrating for the readers! I hope you can get your towbar sorted.

OK, Keith, so we now have: it’s a genuine VW-group electrically-lowering towbar you’ve managed to fit it, physically it now needs coding, for the car to connect properly the dealer isn’t able/willing to do the coding you can’t do it yourself, because you don't have the equipment you don’t want an auto-electrician to do it. If I've got that wrong, please say so. if I've got it right, the question for the forum is: Have you fitted such a towbar, and how did you get it coded?

OK, so you have difficulty writing. We can look past that. Silver did so, beautifully. To take things forward usefully, he asked you some questions, and I asked you one. You haven’t answered them. We can’t really help if you don’t answer the questions.

Calm down a minute and note how well people have tried to answer you. You started the conversation by assaulting all readers, so things weren’t likely to go well. Initially, I’ll admit, I got as far as “Norm Opening” and wondered who is Norm, and what is he opening? Silver did a sterling (geddit?) job of translating for us, but you gave him no thanks, nor offered any confirmation of whether his necessary guesses were right. My comment about the hole was to suggest that perhaps it isn’t a genuine Skoda bar that you are trying to fit. Is it?

Well, I have the towbar and can confirm that it doesn’t involve any hole in the plastic bumper.

Well done, Silver.