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Don't underestimate just how much higher the higher fuel bills are on the petrol 4x4. Also do check the insurance costs of it prior to committing to purchase. @RWorgan's car would be an excellent alternative if you want 4x4 and can live with diesel, it looks well priced. Another plus of that car is that the Superb MK2 has the clever boot/hatch split, which I really like and is sadly missing from the MK3. Nowhere near as pretty as the MK3 IMO though, if that's an issue.

I'm with you on this, @Gaz. There may be different suppliers of the correct oil and filter & other seals etc., but there seems no point in supplying them yourself when your garage should be able to supply the correct items themselves. Something's not quite as it should be, there. Either you trust your garage to do the job right, or you don't. Personally, if I didn't trust my garage, I'd go elsewhere. I wouldn't feel comfortable if I felt I needed to oversee them and ensure they used the right parts. I can't imagine the mechanics at the garage are over the moon about it, either.

Okay, fair enough. 👍

Buy the best tyres you can afford, is my advice on budget mods if you don't fancy a remap. Keep it spotlessly clean and wax/polish it well if you want it to look good. Think about maybe getting it Lanoguarded or whatever underseal protection you prefer. But generally, I don't think you really have a problem to solve. I suspect you've got an itch you think modding your car will scratch.

This rings warning bells for me and I recommend caution. This is just my opinion, but I would take it to a garage where the mechanics are able to source their own parts for the gearbox service. It's not a particularly complicated or difficult job, but it does need to be done absolutely correctly, and it sounds like your local garage are not entirely confident they know what they're doing, but have decided it should be easy enough and there's a decent margin in it. Any subsequent problems they can blame on you for supplying them with the "wrong" oil or filter.

Hello! 😊 The best place to get an answer to this post is in the Octavia MK3 forum.

Ah! My post in video form. How useful. Thanks @AGFalco

Hello and welcome. 😊

Hello. Can you repost that in English, please?

I did not simply say "oversteer bad" in my first attempt. I said the following. That is a clear and understandable explanation of why new tyres are recommended to go on the rear axle of a car. That original answer was, though I say so myself, pretty much perfect, and it continues to hold true. Particularly my closing "whether you agree with it or not is a different matter". I was bemused at why you asked me to elaborate, but elaboration is not a problem. (Frankly, getting me to limit my elaboration is usually more of a problem.) I can usually explain what I understand, and it seems my explanation has done the trick. Hurrah! I didn't get annoyed that you asked me to elaborate, I got annoyed that you assumed I was insulting you. While I'm at it, my highlighting of my mate's disgraceful tyre shows that even people who should know better can end-up driving a death trap, and guidelines have to be put in place to cover the lowest common denominator. For the same reason, we now have warning notices on McDonald's coffee to let people know the contents are hot.

Take the chip off your shoulder @Yogi-Bear. It was NOT irrelevant, and my point was well made. I was in no way calling YOU stupid in that post. However your triggered response to my suggestion that there are careless morons out and about on the road, and guidance has to be issued with such people in mind, coupled with the fact that I'm having to explain the difference between understeer and oversteer in greater detail as you couldn't grasp the concept when I made the point in a sentence, is evidence that you might not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier. That's a YOU problem. 🤷‍♂️ I thought I'd explained myself pretty clearly here. Oh well, here goes again. Don't be replying to this post telling me you know all this already and don't need me to explain it at length, because that is literally what you just asked for. Put simply, it's because of lift-off oversteer. If a driver gets a bit out of shape in a car, they tend to brake, or at least lift off the throttle. This is well known, so most cars are set up to understeer if you go round a bend too fast. When you do slow the car that has lost grip in understeer, there is a weight transfer, with more weight put onto the front tyres, and less weight on the back tyres. As a result of this weight transfer, the front tyres grip more and the rear tyres grip less. (If you've ever ridden a bike, you should know all about weight transfer under braking.) All being well, the car slows a bit, more weight transfers onto the understeering front tyres, which (fingers crossed) get more grip, and the driver makes it round the corner with the rear of the car obediently following the front. If this doesn't work, then the car continues the understeer and goes in a straight-ish line off the road. This front grip gain and rear grip loss is exacerbated if you have tyres with more grip on the front, even before the weight transfer. So if you have less grippy tyres on the back, when you get into your understeer situation, your most grippy tyres at the front have lost traction already, and as you slow the car while trying to go round the bend, you will initiate the weight transfer. At this time, you will lift vehicle weight off the back tyres onto the front tyres, and while the front tyres may regain grip, the combination of less grippy tyres at the back and less weight over those less grippy rear tyres at the rear can provoke oversteer. Oversteer is where the rear of the car does not obediently follow the front, but slides outwards turning the vehicle more than required. Such oversteer induced by slowing around a bend is called lift-off oversteer. Here's a fairly mild example of lift-off oversteer which the driver, who by the sound of the engine is fairly enthusiastic, discovers lift-off oversteer. While he quickly catches and corrects it, he ends up on the wrong side of the road facing oncoming traffic. So to summarise: Understeer sends you in a fairly predictable straight-ish line off the road, and is easy to correct by simply slowing down, which most people do instinctively without training. Oversteer is less predictable, requires skill to catch and correct, and instinctive slowing down makes it worse. The more grip you have at the rear, the less likely you are to oversteer when going round a bend too fast. That is about as simple as I can make it.

Any garage that rejects work and doesn't put you in touch with another garage who can & will do the work are failing you. Good luck sorting this out, do let us know how you get on. Incidentally, today I took a box of chocs into my preferred garage. I'd had to take my wife's car to another garage for a cambelt change and a big service. The other garage did a the work, but they'd over-filled the brake fluid and under-filled the coolant without providing additional coolant to top it up. When I contacted them about the coolant problem, they told me to top it up with water, which I found unsatisfactory. Anyway, it made me appreciate my usual garage a little more, hence me dropping in with a box of chocs and my appreciation for their attention to detail.

This is a tyre that came off a colleague's MPV at work a few years ago. (He's an experienced engineer and we make safety-critical products.) This is what the people issuing advice on new tyres are up against: People who may be clueless, stupid, don't care about their tyres or a combination of all of those factors. All things considered, with the emphasis on stopping stupid people getting into accidents, I think it's a good call to recommend putting the new tyres on the back axel. You can always mandate to have them put on the front if you prefer.

As if by magic... https://www.sharesmagazine.co.uk/news/market/1728031138708872700/uk-private-demand-for-new-diesel-cars-growing-faster-than-for-evs

The advice is because the new tyres are expected to be the best tyres on the vehicle, and by putting the best tyres on the rear axle, the car is less likely to oversteer, which is a characteristic most drivers cannot cope with on the roads. That is the thinking behind it, whether you agree with it or not is a different matter.

Yes I have. Have I committed to memory every one of the posts on the 288 pages of posts added here since 2021? No I haven't. If you have a specific disagreement with something I've said today, (which I think can be summarised in the quote below) then please state what you disagree with. If not, then I don't know what you're trying to get at. 🤷‍♂️

I'm happy to say it does not, but it is more complex than it appears at a glance. My advice is:- 1) Take the car to a garage and get the problem checked. 2) Get the analysis of the problem and the proposed course of action to resolve the problem from the garage. 3a) If you like the sound of the garage's solution, take it. 3b) If you don't like the sound of the solution, bring the garage's analysis of the problem, their proposed solution and your disagreement with the analysis/proposed solution to the forum for discussion. I think the real problem is that OP doesn't have a local trusted garage. I'm not sure their relationship with their local garage will improve if they rock up and demand the Briskoda "solution" be implemented without giving the garage a chance to have a say on the problem. I am sure there is little that mechanics find more irritating, than people who bring their cars to them with an internet diagnosis that the customer insists is correct and must be adhered to, regardless of what the garage mechanic thinks. I say give your local garage a chance to sort it out, and if you don't like the sound of their proposed solution, THEN look online for a better resolution to the problem.

One of the basics you learn when debating politics (bear with me) is that people often lubricate their ideology by warping the meaning of words. I mention that here as that "New Automotive" PDF is a great example of this. We all know that registering a car is not the same as selling a car, yet the two terms are used interchangeably in the piece to make EV sales sound rosy. The reality is that EV sales are anything but rosy at the moment. Happily, things might pick up somewhat when people realise that there are some great EV bargains to be had just now.

As a non-expert I would be thinking yes it absolutely could. It's also very suspicious that the garage doesn't want the work to put it right. I think you need an expert second opinion from a mechanic that can inspect the vehicle, and if they tell you the garage is at fault, chase them up for repair costs.

I'm surprised there aren't "Steep Incline" & Steep Decline" settings on the vehicle, but I know nowt about them. A bit of counter-intuitive thinking here, but I wonder if it might be worth trying "Sport" mode as an alternative to "Manual" for the steep hills, to get it to hold low gears for longer, but not as long as manual mode?

From what Barrie was saying, motor traders (not all of whom are evil merchants) are getting bitten hard by the 'dumping' of pre-registered brand-new EVs. So for those people who prefer to purchase a car, rather than have it on the never-never, they are going to suffer greater than expected depreciation when they come to part-ex their car. Not only that, but in the event of an accident, an EV owner might find their expensively-bought EV is written-off in a fairly minor accident, and the value offered them for the written-off vehicle could be surprisingly low. You make some good points in your post. A lot of the initial enthusiasm for EVs was driven by shrewd people playing the game and getting a fancy but remarkably tax-efficient vehicle that they could run for pennies. Most of these people were already affluent and had the entry fee to play the game. While those shrewd & affluent people are doubtless still playing the game cleverly, there will be some people who are going to end up, somewhat unfairly IMO, with the short end of the stick.

Your local garage can inspect the vehicle, take data readings, and take a test drive. Why do you think you'll have more confidence in advice given you about your DPF on here, than you would from your local garage, as a first port of call? My advice is to take it to your garage, and ask them for advice on the problem. When you have been given expert advice by a mechanic who has seen the problem for themselves, if you are dissatisfied at that point, that would be a good time to come to the forums with your problem, and describe the problem and the advice you have been given to resolve the problem, which you are dissatisfied with.

My point was that EV depreciation is being driven by EV pre-registration, which is driven by the prospect of punitive fines. Beyond that, [Dings bell] Thank you! Morning!

I do not know. Why do you ask? Just for you George, I've edited my original post. 😘

It's my understanding that if car manufacturers EV sales do not exceed a specific percentage, they will be fined. Pre-registering counts as a sale, it seems, so they desperately pre-register to get the "sales" figures up.