J.R.

Lets hope that they get the airbag & inertia fuel cut off sensors working for the production models.

Street or pavement? They would both recieve punctured tyres in my street in the UK.

Tread depth or lack of it has no relation to the possibility of a blow out, punctures yes but a blow out is an explosion rupturing the tyre usually at speed, more often than not caused by overheating resulting from underinflation and/or overloading. Damage to the inner reinforcing resulting in bulges will also cause blow outs but again usually in conjunction with excess heat. Tyres will happily wear all the tread away then through the reinforcing leaving the plys exposed without blowing out.

That is what can happen if you dont drive the car at 168mph or 186mph at least once a month with the airconditioning switched on Or it could be the imbalance between the ratings, 168mph not fast enough for one pair and 186mph too fast for another. Seriously, how on earth did we ever get to the situation where a 1.4l family car needs tyres rated to 186mph? 🥴 And said tyre correctly inflated carrying a fraction of its load rating will blow out at 70mph! I'm lucky if once a month I can legally drive over 50mph.

I hope the protestors that caused that accident were prosecuted. Was this TV presenter driving a car not belonging to himself? Will his name be added to the long list of "Walk away" celebs & racing drivers to have done the same thing at test days to their fans vehicles?

I may have screwed my diff bearings through making a stupid mistake with the drain plugs, so I have a couple of saved E-bay listings of complete diff assemblies with Gen 5 Haldex pump & controller included and they were all around the £250-300 mark inc delivery. If the pump alone is that price it might be worth looking around, buying a complete unit using what you need & selling on the rest, you would still need the oil though, I re-used the old O rings, its easy to judge if they are serviceable, parts not so easy to find here and delivery costs can be prohibitive, if they had been damaged I probably have the right sizes amongst my stock of random O rings otherwise I have a splice tool for made to measure ones.

My MK1 Octavia went to the scrapyard at 17 years old and 525000 kms with the original brake fluid. I do some teaching of English at the Lycée pro where mechanics, paint sprayers, logistics & lorry drivers learn their trade, fully equipped modern workshop, my car went through the checks every year that we offered to the public to raise money for the Téléthon, it never once showed any moisture content on the brake fluid testers that were sent off and calibrated every year. I was not reassured & would have been happeir had it shown something, I would not put it past a French certification body to calibrate & certify a non finctioning piece of equipment every year so I bought my own tester from Ali-Express which was dead on arrival and I never got refunded for either 🙁

The pressure in the low pressure side of an R134a AC system (system not running) is proportional to the ambient temperature and will be from 30psi at 0°c to 130psi at 40°c. Your instructions no doubt are for filling when the system is running and the low side pressure will be from 20-30psi at 0°c to 25-35psi at 40°c and is absolutely not the way to judge whether the system is sufficiently charged. VAg and all modern systems are filled by weight requiring the old refrigerant to be vacuumed out and the specific weight (525g for example) re-introduced. If you dont have vacuum & recycling facilities & are refilling or topping up from a 13kg cylinder like me or the throwaway can that you have you have to use a guage set and watch the changing values between the high and low side pressures to be able to stop somewhere in the region of the correct fill but even that is a shot in the dark. At normal temp of say 20°c you would hope to achieve 70psi in both the low and high sides with the pump not running and with the aircon switched on full to see the low side drop to 20-30 psi and the high side rise to 100-150 psi but with the variable output compressors with the N280 modulating valve you are never likely to get the pump running at 100% like you could on an older E/M clutch compressor that was either full on or off.

Pushing your balls through the tiny orifice requires much pumping 🤣 You can have the same dynamic wheel balancing for free by putting water in your tyres, my industrial washing machine uses that system, turn the drum by hand and you can hear the water sloshing around in the sealed annular chamber, its very very effective against unbalanced loads.

I had my Yeti MOT'd in the UK before re-registering it in France, I used a friend that did all my cars before I moved to France. He could not carry out the emissions test because it needed all 4 wheels to be turning to rev above 3.5k, it was passed with the mention that the emissions test could not be carried out. The brake test had to be done with an old school Tapley meter again because it was a 4x4. And by virtue of the French registration process that MOT is valid for 2 years Not quite sure how I would get on if I were pulled driving it in the UK after 12 months.

I have replaced the Swing unit in both my Octavia 2 and the Yeti with aftermarket WinCE units and they both were the smaller Bolero size, only ever saw one listed the correct size and it was a silly price. I could never fnd a facia either so had to make adaptors each time, they are OK but if anyone can point me in the direction of a £15ish facia for the pre F/L Octavia with Climatronic and also one for the Yeti with cheap spec heater then I would happily replace the bodged adaptors.

10/15 minutes is not long enough to wait, you need the key out of the ignition, all doors and bonnet closed or at least the car to think they all are and the vehicle locked, 140ma is reasonable initially while the canbus is still active but you should check again after 30 minutes and then one hour.

The engine will probably rev beyond 2.5k as soon as the wheels are turning. That feature caused me loads of unecessary anguish during my rebuild. "They all do that sir!"

因為我很愚蠢，可以嘗試一下！ Yīnwèi wǒ hěn yúchǔn, kěyǐ chángshì yīxià!

I hope you can read Chinese if you do that. Ask me how I know 🙁

No could about it, it is dangerous and should not be on the road especially now that the details are in the public domain. Insisting (not asking) that they commit to stating their position in writing so that you may pass the letter on to your insurers should focus them somewhat.

What makes you think that your digital guage is accurate? I have many and they all give different readings, some of them differ if you take 2 consecutive readings of the same tyre. The only ones that I trust are my PCL and an American motorsport one and I still check them against each other, the old style Dunlop/Romac pen style pressure guages always seem to remain accurate or stop working altogether. Never known quite how they work, some Googling coming up!

Agree

Are you a service receptionist in a dealership by any chance? AFAIK VAG vehicles have been fitted with the clutchless variable output Sanden type (+ other suppliers) of aircon compressor where the N280 valve controls the volume of refrigerant being pumped for at least the last 14 years. Will be happy to learn otherwise.

Are you sure about that?

He may have claimed to have but it would be rather difficult to replace something that does not exist. Maybe their bullsh1tometer was away for calibration at the time.

If the pressures were OK corrected for ambient temperature, low side falling high side rising much higher then the N280 will have been functioning, if they both remained equal and unchanged either the pump is not turning or the N280 is not functioning.

Any of the dedicated VAG ones be they expensive Android or cheap WinCE units usually with the shaped faceplate will be compatible with all that was displayed on the OE radio screen. Read the small print carefully though, it will depend on the year and functionality, on mine the parking sensors showed but the temp settings didn't, no issue because they showed on the Climatronic and Maxidot anyway. And the "dedicated" ones sold at a higher price aside from having the right faceplate size if you are lucky you will find can be programmed (if you get the factory) code to be compatible with the Canbus data protocoles from 100's of world wide manufacturers many I had never heard of, all thats "dedicated" about them is they are pre-programmed and should work out of the box.

Probably but not always, failure of the shear plate or pulley splines will also have the same result, VCDS shows a compresor load and RPM but its simply a calculated figure. My Yeti showed no fault codes, no shut off codes, showed high side pressure above the fault code point but was not cooling, put guages on and I could see it did not have enough refrigerant, low side dropped but high side barely increased, a small amount of gas had it functioning as it should. I did have N280 problems on the Octavia though with exactly the same symptoms.