J.R.

I don't have a problem. Because I have no desire to drive a connected games console with a vertical tea tray sticking up from the centre of the dashboard, nor do I want to talk to my car. I have a reliable & functional means of transport that does not bring me problems like everything I own with a touch screen does.

As you insist. You are wrong Victor Kiam.

My MK1 Octavia 1.9 TDi did 325000 miles without a single penny or centime being spent on any of those items, in fact all the engine needed during that time was an £8 cambelt, a £12 alternator regulator pack (worn brushes) and an £8 coolant temp sensor all of which would have been needed on a petrol engine plus many spark plugs and by the sound of things several coil packs. I think your comments are valid for newer EU5 and EU6 diesels but do the new petrol engines have any less complicated emissions systems?

I am currently blind in the left eye, I have no problem using any of the physical controls on my car, they are all tactile & I can operate them all by feel while keeping my eye (not eyes!) on the road ahead. I would not be able to correctly touch that button even at a standstill & looking at the screen, I know this because I really struggle selecting an address on the satnav on my Chinese head unit with an 8" touch screen. Using the smartphone is a real nightmare, I do all my typing at the computer now. Car controls have used ergonomics and tactile discrimination for decades and it benefits all drivers not just those with visual impairment, I doubt that any of you take your eyes off the road to use 95% of them, as has been said using a mobile phone etc on the move is against the law, its crazy that they should be allowed to get away with this. In the same vein, indicators have become larger and much more visible and distinct over the years thanks to road safety legislation, now they are becoming tiny blips of yellow LED light under a clear lens and practically invisable against the blinding glare of the DRL surrounding them.

If you are an economy minded driver then you will always do better than cruise control, it will accelerate you up to the preset speed with a wider throttle opening than you would, it will maintain the set speed up a hill even if it has to use a wide open throttle whereas you will happily let some of the speed bleed off on a partial throttle opening. Conversely when going down a long hill with either a flat road ahead or better still another hill you will allow the car to exceed your desired nominal speed on the light throttle opening to allow the inertia to carry you further up the hill the other side.

No information from inclination sensors (which exist but for other reasons) is used to determine shift up points, its simply a comparison of the throttle position and the acceleration, on the flat the vehicle will accelerate quicker for a given throttle position than on a hill and hence the gearbox will short-shift the upchanges on partial throttle.

I learned how robust ECU's are when I rebuilt a written off fire damaged 1995 Ford Galaxy. The remains of the ECU looked like they had been dragged from the ashes of a bonfire, deep fat fried & then barbecued for good measure, the casing was blackened beyond recognition but intact, where the connector should have been was just a fused mass of knotted copper wire wire strands & no insulation that I had to cut through with bolt croppers to release it. I used to show people it as a joke & say I was going to re-use it, it's just minor smoke damage. One day I started trimming away the copper wire to expose the fused mass of plastic, I cut carefully with a hacksaw and levered away small molten sections at a time to reveal the ECU connector housing was intact underneath, it took a lot of patience but I removed all the debris, cleaned the connectors and managed to connect it to the new loom. After a lot of working through relay plates & jumper cables etc (I did not know what was missing from my vehicle or what its correct spec should have been) I finally managed to get the engine cranking and a couple of times it sounded like it wanted to kick into life, could I have imagined it? I removed and cleaned the idle bypass airflow mechanism and the engine started & ran. I later had a friend in a Ford dealership download the latest software and pair it with the new instrument binnacle and apart from the fault codes generated during the fire (a loom short circuit) it was in perfect operating condition.

Well done indeed Statistically I would say there is one case of ECU failure for every ten thousand times a mechanic pronounces "it must be the ECU" which translates to "I cant find whats wrong, I dont know what I am doing, just take your car away and get out of my hair"

You said it!!!

My high miler was not a PD, its true the belt does a lot more work on that engine. Re the torsion value make sure it is a true zero degrees (very hard to hit) and not the zero indicated when its outside of limits but the engine running like a dog.

Remove the cover, inspect the belt and make your decision, nobody can do it for you. On the one hand it hasn't done many miles, on the other twice the recommended time has elapsed, its condition would dictate my decision but I have been lucky so far and changed one at 250K miles when I could see it was deteriorating, others have had catastrophic problems at lower mileage.

Blocked pollen filter. I say that on the assumption, probably about to be disproved by those more clued up than me, that when recirculating air it has already been through the filter so the filter is bypassed in that mode.

Did you use a base & clear? That is silver base coat followed by clear 2K lacqueur? A solid colour metallic from a single aerosol will always look pants and even with the right paint its only on certain parts like the bottom of a wing or wheelarch that you can get away with blending in silver metallic. Well of course you cant get away with it but in most areas you should not even try.

Lots of people believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus but would they believe that the garage reset the timing on their 3 year old EU6 vehicle when it was in for service because of the local fuel quality?

Most of them go into plastic inserts one or two into spire fasteners which have no resistance, it sounds like the scew heads have corroded, I would use a L/H flute 6mm or larger drill bit in a battery drill to back them out.

How true that is.

Interesting to read of the economy you are all getting from the petrol engines & to hear of someone whos diesel MPG dropped significantly possibly after the emissions fix, does anyone else have any experience of this? I have just moved to a 2.0 TDi 105hp Yeti from an Octavia 2 1.9 Tdi 105hp & before that a MK1 1.9 Tdi 110hp and both of them always returned 55-65 mpg. The Yeti by comparison has been a real dissapointment, it had the emissions fix before I owned it and is also a 4x4, there is also a greater frontal area but if anything I drive this one much slower and with an even lighter right foot. I do the same regular 20 mile round trips to the running club and the MPG was always within 2 or 3 each time, the Yeti does note even come close, the maxidot shows the average over 4 or more tankfulls at 47.3mpg but knowing they are often overoptimistic I also measure & calculate on a brim to brim basis as I did with the previous cars and the calculations are a consistent 43.5 mpg. One thing that I have noticed is that on local short journeys around town the economy is probably better than the previous TDi's and I can do a 6 mile return trip under 30 mph in traffic, roundabouts etc and it will be up to 43 mpg (better than the Octavias) but get out on the open road at a constant 50 mph where the MPG should start really climbing and it does not change one bit. I am really beginning to question if its due to the emissions fix or that the EGR etc is clagged up, the car feel fine so I dont really know if its worse after the emissions fix, its very nippy through the gears but mid range overtaking is poor by comparison but that may be due to it being underpowered at 105hp and the extra gear ratio making it feel nippier through the gears at lower speeds than the Octavias. Has anyone else seen a significant drop in MPG after the emissions fix and does anybody get significantly better MPG from a 4x4 Yeti? I will get it remapped one day by Celtic tuning and if I have it done at their workshop they can roll back the emissions fix, has anyone else done this and was there a benefit?

If the dished section is filling up with fuel then the rust has perforated, if the leak is further down then it will be the sealing O ring damaged. If the top plate is intact now is the time to use some rust convertor and protective paint, a job I must also do.

You are at least 30 years behind the time in thinking that the ignition advance could be altered during a service, back in the days of points & condensor yes, in the very early days of electronic ignition when they still used a distributor yes also but since the advent of ECUs & closed loop lamda control not on your Nelly! And those were also the last days that you would ever have been able to hear or detect pinking unless the vehicles knock sensor is faulty which would throw up a fault code, the ignition timing and fuelling are adjusted in milliseconds as the piezo sensor detects the combustion is approaching the knock threshold. The OP's vehicle may well perform better on 98 fuel and be more economical because the ECU can run more ignition advance but he wont have felt or experience pinking. It has been probably 30 years since I heard a vehicle on the road pinking and then it was an old schnorrer.

I asked the question once, I have lived to tell the tale but I advise you to wear a hard hat! I'm off to get some popcorn now 😀

Common sense & responsability for your own actions seems to have all but dissapeared in this modern litigious its always someone elses fault world. Before cars were overspecced in every way very few vehicles cooling systems could cope with towing a laden caravan up hills on a hot summers day, the drivers would keep a close eye on their temperature guages and on the holiday routes there would be parking areas before, half way up and at the top of the big long hills. Those who knew their cars limitations would stop for a picnic allowing the engine to cool before climbing, others would stop half way when they saw the temp guage needle start climbing, those who stopped at the top usually had steam coming out.

Its not a linear relationship and the gearing will play a large part in the max speed acheieved, I doubt that any of the vehicles will be at V max with the revs at the max power point. Iffor example you have one vehicle 140 hp = 140mph top speed and the other 160hp = 160 top speed even if they were at the revs equating to peak power tuning an engine to produce 150 hp will result in less than 150mph top speed ignoring all the other variables. I think the power required to overcome the wind and rolling resistance increases with the square of the increase in speed desired, it is probably a different exponential but definitely is not linear. Its why no matter how much HP is thrown at a new supercar it will only go a little bit faster than the predecessor, to beat the current production car record speed (Bugatti Veyron?) is probably going to require a doubling of the horsepower requiring a much larger air intake making a larger frontal area and increased drag, future record holders will be electric powered and with very low CdA.

Agreed, possibly more corrosion than normal, my Octavia 2 was like that and the Yeti quite exposed to coastal weather, it made swiss cheese of the brake backplates on both vehicles but the suspension components will last for decades on both. TBH I would be more worried if a 10 year old car had shiny wishbones, torsion beams, trailing arms etc, I would question if it had been in an accident. And of course any advisorys of rust on the monocoque construction are to be investigated.

It could be 30 years away from a fail, they do an advisory for any surface rust, notwithstanding that the Yeti 4x4 does not have a rear axle every old school car that I have owned from the rotbox era had a rusty rear axle and none of them ever progressed to the point of it being an MOT failure. I suppose the pressed steel rear trailing arms would be the most likely to eventually perforate given enough time and salt water exposure.

We are a similar age and background, making a tracker with cow-horn handlebars, remember it well. Do you recall the "ape hanger" bar craze after Easy Rider? I have never owned a new bike and was doing up & selling bikes for a living at the age of 11financed by the money I collected doing a paper round but being a "Junior Agent" I earned 1/2p per paper delivered out of the 6p collected from the customers, my pay was 75p a week which I deducted from the £3 collected from the customers (if they paid 😞) but critically I had the free use of €2.25 +ve cashflow for 7-14 days to finance my buying and selling. I would buy a bike and immediately advertise it for sale in that Fridays paper, had to make sure that all the repairs were done and hope that it sold or I would have to hide when the guy came to collect the takings. I never had pocket money and have always had a business on the side of one kind or another whenever I wasn't self employed or running my own business. The pushbikes got me started. I have used my Dawes extensively since I got it in around 1990 including 500kms from Canberra to Sydney, an all that time it has only needed brake blocks, tyres, chains and one rear sprocket set, last year the Shimano STI 7 speed changer finally broke and I after a worldwide search on the interweb I finally found a new old stock one (it was second hand 🙁) in Japan that cost me more than a new bike would have cost but I cannot put a price on the attachment I have to something that has served me so well. Even now when I ride it the STI gear selector seems state of the art