EnterName

Cue Sid James laugh. 😄

I have a different engine/gearbox, but mine moves off in 1st gear and quickly changes itself to 2nd.

The high RPM in that 1st to 2nd gear change does seem odd. Hmmm.

Just a thought, and unfortunately it's a PITA to track down, but I wonder if you could have a poor electrical connection somewhere? I had a problem with a Seat diesel some moons ago, and it turned out to be a poor crimp on a connector that would lose briefly contact over some bumps and cause a drop in power. (I remember it as related to the throttle: When you lift off it detects no throttle input and shuts off the fuel, and this fault was thinking the driver had lifted off the throttle and shut off the fuel, albeit briefly.) It took flipping ages to track down as it was an intermittent problem and of course in garage conditions it never played up.

Hello and welcome! I too had a lovely Ibiza FR TDI 130 which my wife wrote-off and I never quite forgave her for.

I keep a few emergency blankets in mine, just in case....

At what RPM does your car change gear during normal driving, @Vlady?

Hello! I'm glad you're enjoying your new Octavia.

Thanks for clearing that up. Ironically I was actually told I'd be getting the space-saver when I ordered the spare wheel kit as they thought I had 18" wheels, but mine are 17". I insisted on the full-size spare, which seemed like a good idea at the time.

Can the 16" full size spare wheel be used in conjunction with the 340x30mm front brake discs, or would the space-saver wheel need to be used as a spare?

Hello and welcome back!

Hello. Nice wheels!

Hello and welcome! Any chance of some pics of your stalwart Octavia?

This is a very good point, and I can understand why tuners would not declare that they disregard some of the emissions concerns to get improved efficiency. If you add @Gerrycan's context to Superchips "How it works" explanation, you can certainly get that impression by reading between the lines when Superchips talks about "...eliminating those 'performance compromises'.", https://www.superchips.co.uk/HowItWorks "Superchips invests extensively in development and testing and we bring over 30 years of experience to the job. We arrive at the optimised settings for your make and model of vehicle, ensuring that each remap is as individual as the software inside your ECU, safely eliminating those ‘performance compromises’." (Incidentally, I have no particular inclination towards Superchips, I've just used them for the purposes of this thread. I've never had a Superchips remap.)

I don't know whether the accuracy of the fuel computer is adversely affected by a remap. I don't know if (but I can certainly believe) the accuracy of the fuel computer is affected by a tuning box that "tricks" the ECU into delivering additional fuel. I suppose it depends how MPG is calculated by the fuel computer. If anyone who knows how MPG is calculated by the car can explain how it's done by the car, that would shed some light on this.

The air con service seems deliberately contrived to be as expensive as possible. I asked my mechanic about it and his advice was to use it and only mess about with it if the air conditioning performance declines. I leave mine on "AUTO" all the time and let it get on with it.

I think the problem is that a significant number of people in the UK only have a very basic grasp on English, and so the language has to be simplified to accommodate them. The trouble is, it's been over-simplified to the point of ambiguity at best, and downright wrong at worst. The police should not be making basic mistakes like that, but sadly to reflect the new diverse society the UK has been transformed into, the police has to reflect the general population so everyone feels "represented".

I wouldn't write back to them about it, but I share your frustration at the hopeless standard of written English by institutions who really need to be able to state the facts of a matter precisely and unambiguously.

This is good advice. I know it's easy to be critical of Ed's feelings regarding this, but I understand his irritation. (Especially at the cost of the phone call.) Unless you have a cynical old so-and-so with you, ruining your car buying experience by pointing out all the problems, it can be easy to get carried away and sign-up for one of the plethora of cash traps Skoda dealers lay for unwary customers. Sometimes the optional extras give good value, sometimes they don't. Personally, I don't like service plans, but that's just my opinion.

Hello! Give your local Trading Standards office a call and see where you stand if you bought the car on the basis it had a full service history and it turns out there is no evidence of the car being serviced. After that, it might be worth phoning up Enterprise saying you're looking at buying one of their cars but are concerned about whether the cars are serviced correctly. If Enterprise say "We have our cars serviced by the appropriate local dealer", then you at least know what should have happened, and if what Skoda told you is correct, it hasn't. If Enterprise tells you have their own garages who do their servicing and repairs, then ask how you as a potential customer can see the service history. Tell them you'll need evidence of the service history when you come to sell the car. See what they say. Basically, you're looking to arm yourself with evidence that the car hasn't been serviced and you've been lied to, in which the conversation with Trading Standards will have primed you for the next step, or evidence that the car HAS been serviced and Enterprise can provide you with a service history. At the moment, because you're not sure how Enterprise operate, you don't know exactly who should have serviced the car, so it's hard to pinpoint who to chase up about whether it has or not. Good luck!

It sounds like the remap sorted out a poor map with excess fuel delivery giving that lump of torque. One of my tuning boxes has a very on/off power delivery around 70mph and it was a right pain. Yeah it can, if it delivers less fuel for a given throttle demand under the same conditions. The fact that the power improvements are given in pretty specific figures, but the MPG increases claimed are usually very vague tells me the claimed fuel economy improvements cannot be relied upon. If anyone has some before/after MPG test data under controlled conditions, I'd love to see it.

To get more MPG, you need to make the car more efficient, i.e. the remap will need to get more energy from the same amount of fuel, so when driving. For the increased MPG claim to be true, the remapped car would have to need less fuel to propel the car forward at a given speed than it did with the original fuelling map. I've never seen any convincing evidence that a remap will improve a vehicle's MPG, though there are plenty of anecdotes about them increasing MPG, and tuners sometimes claim increased MPG as the remap will give the car more torque at low RPM which means you can use a lower gear. (What they don't say is HOW the car gets more torque at low RPM. The answer, presumably, is that they bung more fuel in.) What's needed is a proper before/after MPG test with a remap, and I haven't seen one of those done. Example claim from Superchips. They simply state you'll get better fuel economy and expect you to take their word for it. If your remapped car fails to give you improved fuel economy, they will tell you it's because you're enjoying all that additional power. (Which is quite likely true.) In my limited experience (two remapped cars and a couple of tuning boxes), a good remap will give you more power when you want it, and no penalty in the form of increased fuel use when you don't. My remapped car has given me improved economy on the same route to my holiday. However no two journeys are precisely the same, and I would not be able to prove that the difference was not caused by traffic conditions or me driving slightly differently. What is undisputable is that if I use the extra power, I get worse fuel economy.

Hi Lenny! 👋 If the car wants 95, try and give it 95.

It's a bit of a reach, but I get where you're coming from. I like how distinctive the split headline design is. It's done a BMW on me, by that I mean when BMW first introduce a new design I usually don't like it, but then it grows on me. I think my favourite car designs are by Audi. Their designs age very well, in my opinion.

Hello and welcome! I hope you're enjoying Spain.