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I did not know this, but I have experienced it and that's part of why I change tyres early as I always got the feeling Conti Premium Contacts changed characteristics when they were getting low. Now I know that's a thing, it seems to give me about 4-5mm of useful tread for the life of the tyre, which doesn't seem like a lot for my £80-£90 a corner.

Yes, I just double-checked and you're quite right. It's 1 euro = 1.19 pounds, not 1.9. I should have gone to spec-savers. Perversely, I'm still in the ball park at around £2K in parts. But yes, always a good idea to double-check my maths.

Argh! I think I might have been miles out on my conversion rate, that or my brain has now had enough maths for one day. Using DukDuckGo 1 euro is 0.84 today. So adjusting my maths and your numbers, Fuel pump €1400 = £1176. Injectors €430 * 2 = £722.40 Bung in the £200-ish water pump kit with cam belt, and we're still in the same ballpark of around £2k for parts alone.

Glad you found them useful. 👍 We always make the best decisions with the information we have at the time, so whatever you decide is the best way forward for you, good luck! 🤞

Hi Ko! @cheezemonkhaiis this something you can help with?

For WO integrity they're good, but I found they were prone to corruption. I found the odd JPG would be unreadable later, which as I was storing family photos was unacceptable. I might have had a bad batch, but rightly or wrongly I took it as a warning and stopped using them for critical backups.

No, I don't think it's worth the cost, unless you have a bad vibe about the car and the warranty would ease your mind. I have the same dilemma as my warranty runs out in a few days, but I'm betting on my car being okay and am declining the extended warranty option.

I tend to have a "belt and braces" approach, with data backed up onto external drives and USB sticks, if it's really important. Time was I used to use optical drives for back-ups, but in my experience they are a bit slow and can't really can't be relied on, so now I haven't even got an optical drive on my PC. (I have an external R/W drive, though. Mind you, I've got an external 3.5" floppy drive reader too, just in case. )

External 2.5" WD drives are reliable and pretty sensibly priced. Very handy for back-ups and making sure important college work doesn't get lost. EDIT: I only ever bought one of their 3.5 external drives and it failed pretty quickly. Also needing external power other than the USB connection was a pain. But I have a load of their external 2.5" Passport drives, and they are all still going strong, even my old 250GB USB-2 speed drives which I bought off Play.com what seems a lifetime ago. I've got one 4T drive which is a bit noisy, but hasn't put a foot wrong, reliability wise.

Some (very) rough maths. High pressure fuel pump is between £500-£600 Injectors seem to vary wildly in price, £150-£300+ with VAT on top, depending on whether you go and which brand you choose. Timing belt (with water pump kit) is what, around £200 So that's certainly over £1000+ in parts, but let's limit it to £1000 to be conservative for this exercise. Multiply by 1.9 for (very) rough conversion to Euros = €1900 in parts. (Maybe more, maybe less.) Labour is about £60-£80/hour, which is €114-€152. (At same 1.9x rate) Call it €130 an hour. €3000-€1900 = €1100 labour cost, or a little over 8.4 hours work at €130 (9.6 hours at €114, 7.2 hours at €152) It's a lot of money, but from my Googling and fairly conservative maths, I'm not smelling a rat here, especially as I've been conservative with the part costs. I can imagine knocking 25%-35% off that labour cost at an independent, but the parts may be more or less than the numbers I got from Google. The question is, does all that work need doing? An expert diagnosis of the problem is needed. Regarding who does the repair work; if you get an independent to do the work, and they don't solve the problem, will they work at no extra cost to resolve the problem? (That should go for the Skoda dealer too.) Not sure what to suggest, TBH.

Did you get a written quotation of what you were getting for your 3K euros?

Early DSGs could be a bit dodgy, especially the dry clutch ones, but later ones are reliable. My Octavia is my first automatic/DSG car, having previously driven manuals since the 1980's. I have the DQ381 and it's excellent. The only time I can wrong-foot it is if I stop, put it in neutral, and then back into drive without delay and sometimes it's a whisker (and I mean a whisker) slow to put me in gear and my throttle input makes the revs rise, and then the clutch can drop in and the car lurch forward. This has more to do with odd driving conditions (and my input) than the gearbox, though. Would definitely have another DSG-equipped car.

What tyres are these?

No, I wonder if that's a simple omission, or something the manufacturers would rather gloss over. I found this, mooching about looking for tyre tread depths. It's from 2005 but seems to strongly disagree with Michelin's "Nah! You'll be fine right up to the 1.6mm legal limit." https://www.rospa.com/rospaweb/docs/advice-services/road-safety/vehicles/tyre-tread-depth.pdf

Yeah, I'll keep digging. It seems to be something that's mentioned in passing, rather than something that's specifically stated.

I'm shopping around for new tyres to replace my disintegrating Bridgestone Turanza 001 tyres. I think I'll probably end up going for Goodyear Eagle F1 Asymmetric 5 or 6, depending on price/availability. However while shopping around, it's emerged that tyre manufacturers are reducing the starting tread depth, with reduced aquaplaning resistance as one of the trade-offs. Time was, tyres started with about 9mm tread. This has slowly dropped and now some tyres start with less than 8mm. So with this in mind, I thought I'd have a shop around and try and see which of the selection of tyres I would be happy to fit starts with the most tread depth, and add that as a factor in determining my decision, as I usually change my tyres somewhere between 3-4mm tread depth. (Michelin state this is unnecessary, and tyres can be safely relied on right down to the 1.6mm legal limit, though other tyre makers disagree.) But I can't find a resource that tells me what the new tyre tread depths are, for any given tyre. Is it marked on the tyre somehow? Is there an online resource giving all the details? Can anyone help?

How long have you had the car is very pertinent: Is this a new problem, or has your MPG always been like this? At 80K miles, I'm wondering how "full" the DPF is. Can you get that checked?

I'd like to know what you're seeing on the instantaneous MPG readout? Can you potter about gently and get a high MPG on very light throttle trundling along at 30-40MPH, with a return to "----" when you lift the throttle completely off? When you accelerate, does it drop down to sensibly high MPG of, oh I dunno, somewhere between 10-20MPG, and then quickly shoot up to higher MPG when you are at a steady speed? What's your instantaneous MPG at a steady 50MPG on the level? (I'd expect that to fall somewhere between 50-70MPG. I've pulled those numbers out of thin air, but they sound reasonable to me.) Beyond that, tyre pressure would be something to double-check, as would verifying your tyre pressure gauge is accurate. EDIT: Also, I'd be inclined bung some Millers DieselClean (or whatever it's called now, PowerPlus?) in and give it an Italian tune-up to try and cook the cobwebs out of the system, if any are present.

I'm glad it went well. 👍 I'm not one for attending meets and events, but I enjoy watching the footage from them.

This is the kit linked to by the video, and that looks similar. https://www.shopdap.com/make-model-year/volkswagen/gti/mk7-2015-present/engine/2-0l-i4-tsi/repair/engine-trim/alltrack-skid-plate-retrofit-kit.html It's probably worth asking the Ebay seller to make sure.

This is something I've got on my "Maybe to do" list too. I saw a really good video on YouTube about fitting one. Source is from a Golf Alltrack. (I hope we're on about the same thing)

For you, I'd say Angel were a bit of a jaunt, however good they are. AFAIK there are some good tuners up north, though I can't point to any specific one to recommend, as I have no experience of them. But if you did go to Angel, I'm pretty sure they'd sort you out with a map to suit your needs, it'd just be a pain if you needed to go back and get it tweaked. (I've had two maps off them and both were perfect for me first time.) Initially I had a bit of a shopping list of what I wanted, but when I spoke with Tom, it's clear that if I told him what I want the power graph to look like, I'd probably get an inferior map than I would by telling him what I wanted the car to feel like after the map, and letting him use his skill to give me what I wanted, rather than what I specifically asked for. Do update us on what you decide to do eventually, even if it's "Nah! I'll keep it standard.". 👍

On my Octavia it's the DQ381. Not sure about @skodamota I've since had mine remapped by Angel Tuning (https://www.angeltuning.co.uk/) who I've used before with a TDCI and both maps I had from them were fairly conservative, with the goal being a bit more power without sacrificing economy. I've got a thread about my search for a remap. (It actually turned into going back to a fairly local supplier I was already familiar with and confident about. That said, there are some useful links in the thread.)

If diesel is getting into the engine oil, it will effectively dilute it. Not sure what the problem is, but it might be something cheap and simple like a blocked breather pipe somewhere, but one of the experts on here will be more use diagnosing the fault than I.

This is very true. I set my tyre pressures for going away during the day, which was a fairly warm day just prior to the heatwave. I checked them again the following morning and there had been about 0.3 bar drop in pressure, which quite surprised me. I think they're 2.5 front and back at the moment, but I might nudge them up to the eco setting, which if I recall correctly is 2.6 bar front and back.