EnterName

The leather is nice, but for me, the sunroof is a problem waiting to happen, and the park assist and electric rear tailgate are novelties, so I'd be looking at the MY18. (And wishing it had a bigger engine. 😄)

Sorry, I missed that. As @Rooted said, I think I'd give it a miss as the price seem a bit high. Not sure how long the clutch pack on the DQ200's last, but they're not renowned for being great gearboxes anyway. (That said, I have a DQ381 on my car, which I had thought was a solid box, but am informed that they can decide to take an early bath.) But your plan to buy a young high-mileage car is sound IMO, so long as the price is right.

Looks okay to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cW5RosDnzg

Hi! What's the mileage on the car?

Just saw this and found it a good watch. Some of you might enjoy it too.

Hello and welcome. You car looks fantastic, very tasteful mods!

You can retrofit anything, if the skill, determination and money are available to get it done. Whether the cost of the retrofit is worth it is debatable, but it can be done. I was quoted £680 to retrofit ACC on my Octavia, at which point I decided I'd rather keep my £680 than add adaptive cruise control to my car. If you need a new camera as well as other bits, lane assist could be an expensive "upgrade" for you. There's no guarantee you'll actually like it when it's fitted, as it's one of those features that can be really helpful, but can also be quite annoying/surprising in its behaviour. A quick search online tells me it's likely to cost you in excess of £1000 to get it fitted by someone, but you might be able to do it cheaper yourself if you can get the bits, have the skill and access to the calibration kit. "Might" is the operative word. Fitting it is one thing, getting it working how you want it to work is quite another.

If you turn off the engine before exiting the vehicle, the warning will not sound.

Be cautious if it's very cold, as the cold makes plastic more brittle. It might be worth leaving until it's warmer, when the plastic is more flexible and forgiving of being bent about.

Not really, I went from the dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/meticulous The "should be fine" approach you took to your worn brakes was not meticulous. I'm not saying it was wrong or unreasonable, or that it was skimping on maintenance. I'm saying it was not meticulous.

Respectfully, I suggest that to be meticulous with car maintenance means to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to anything that is not 100% okay. You cannot accept that the brakes will need changing soon, but should be fine for next week's MOT and claim to be meticulous. Delaying repair until absolutely necessary is a reasonable and cost-effective approach to car maintenance, but it is not meticulous.

Thank you @bigade1, this is so helpful. I really appreciate you posting these updates. 👍

I have a few concerns. Unless things have changed dramatically since I bought my car 3.5 years ago (2019 SE L), cars with a really high spec like that are hard to find, and tend to get snapped up quickly. So a car in a good colour that is highly specced-up is unlikely to be sat at a dealer's for a couple of months, let alone 18 months. I hear Google Chrome has an extension that allows you to track price drops on AutoTrader. If that is correct, it might be worth seeing how much that car was originally put up for sale at and track the price changes. Also, as @kodiaqsportline says, that interior really is very nice. That might be down to meticulous care by the previous owner, but if that were the case, it seems unlikely that a meticulous owner would let the brakes get to a dangerous state to be bounced at the MOT. That seems odd to me. But if everything works and it drives well, it looks like a nice car with an unusually high spec. I think I'd run a vehicle check on it to ensure there are no nasty surprises waiting to be discovered. Good luck!

Good luck! 🤞

Second this. It is insane how many spurious faults seem to be kicked off by a weak/dodgy battery.

Personally, I dislike the 1.0 TSI in anything other than a super-mini, and I predicted they would start to fall apart at around 100k miles of hard work in the larger cars. However I haven't seen reports that this has happened with VAG 1.0 engines (though the Ford 1.0L engines have a pretty ropey reliability on both engine & gearbox, AFAIK) so it looks like my prediction has not (yet) come to pass. So based on what I know, I don't think expecting 5 years happy motoring out of this vehicle to be unreasonable at all. That said, I'd still go for a 1.5TSI in preference over the 1.0TSI engine, but then I wouldn't buy a Karoq in the first place, so my preference is not relevant to you. Might be worth finding out why the water pump was changed.

Having a reversing camera for most people is a pleasant luxury, not a necessity. I have managed without a reversing camera for decades. Then I fitted one, and while find I still use my mirrors to reverse, the camera is useful for precise manoeuvring where there is a bollard or other low obstacle directly behind my car. Perhaps your post can make people with reversing cameras feel inferior to you, but I expect they'll see straight through your "amazement" to the childish malice behind it.

I think he's a bit ahead of you on that idea, hence the divorce.

IMO give it a good spray with contact cleaner as suggested by nta16. I wouldn't use GT85 or any other oil-based lubricant on electrics, however nice it smells.

One slightly random point: My neighbours are getting divorced. For some time, he (who is getting booted out) brought his Tesla to charge at what was home, during an initial period of goodwill. However the period of goodwill is now over and the Tesla (on lease) is not allowed to be charged at home. I wonder how he's doing for charging, now the availability of home charging is denied to him? He still has to work full time, and is now in the process of going through a divorce with associated stress and costs of that. He's probably got a tough gig for a while.

My car's getting a treat with proper colour code touch-up paint. Previously I've used "close enough" Hammerite" smooth for stone chips, which was fine on white and silver cars. Absolute animal, but I figured if it ever got bad enough, I'd get the panel resprayed. But it never did! 😄

👍Thank you.

How you react to minor paintwork damage is up to you. I think trying to keep paintwork perfect is understandable, and you can keep your car looking pristine, but you have to take the hit on the cost of doing that. Or one can take the touch-up paint approach, and accept a spotty car. Personally, I've managed to come to terms with my car having mild acne. I remove any paint over the rust, degrease with white spirit, then isopropyl, prepare the bare metal with Karust as a rust treatment, and them apply paint to finish. It produces a finish that might make @Rooted wince, but it'll do me. As I have a white car, such touch-ups are hard to spot as it's quite a forgiving colour, but I appreciate you might want a perfect finish in that lovely metallic blue. Bear in mind, you WILL get stone chips and other minor paint damage if you drive your car, so if you can get some expertise in touching up paintwork well yourself, that's likely to be a good investment rather than £200+vat to keep sorting out blemishes as you find them. Personally, I have learned to accept that so long as it's not going rusty, I'm happy enough with the touch-up dots on my car, here and there. But I accept that others may have higher standards than me in this regard.

This is worth doing, if you're serious about the car. https://www.carvertical.com/gb You can get a 10% discount by using various YouTubers discount codes.

The fact that (pulls a statistic out of the air but it sounds right) most EVs are leased and not bought and owned, with insurance (and tyres and "servicing") part of the deal, I suspect a lot of very high EV premiums have been quietly hidden from view, and dare I suggest, there may have been a little government "nudge" of the insurers to make sure that prospective EV customers weren't discouraged from buying an EV by huge insurance costs. When the lease chickens come home to roost, and the EV vehicles start to trickle out onto the second-hand car market, I suspect either there will be a lot of car sellers offering "12 months free insurance" with their EVs, or a lot of startled buyers when they try to insure their sub 5-second 0-60 EV rocket. I suspect short-range low powered EVs will probably still be fairly cheap to insure. I'm not convinced by the supposed dangers of EVs blowing up/catching fire etc.