J.R.

Maybe but whilst the fiddle factor does not come in until just under 1/2 tank there is also the thing common to most vehicles that the fuel guage does not drop from full until you have done a very significant distance, to the point where you would have consumed close to 1/4 of a tank. However if you know your guage well and this particular journey then why not. If I am paying attention to the guage I can tell within 5 minutes of driving when the low (not) fuel level bong will happen, not from how many miles I have done on the tank but through the needle sweep.

Thanks for your explanation. I have not eaten any benefit from the car insurances I have paid for the last 35 years and hope that situation will continue.

You could not choose a worse method, the system fiddles the readings from 3/8 of a tank & below to create a virtual reserve capacity when the guage and readout is telling you the car is on empty. The only sure way is brim to brim refuelling calculation.

Press and hold down the button or scroll wheel, same deal for the current journey stats. I am referring to the button, scroll wheel, or whatever the control is that you use on your vehicle to toggle between current journey stats and long term stats. I hope that makes sense, not easy to decribe from memory and its different with steering wheel or stalk controls, I just played around till it did what I wanted.

What did you expect support for? you paid monthly for a service plan and then were refunded the money that you had paid but still feel hard done by. Why do you consider the payments lost? you were refunded, you had the benefit free of charge.

The planetary gears can explode if hydrolock occurs while cranking, someone asked me to spray easi-start into the intake of their diesel Vauxhall Insh1tnia while they cranked and I did exactly as asked not knowing what the result was going to be 😒 The VAG starters are pretty bulletproof though in my experience, I have had one smoking from abuse and it went on for another hundred thousand miles & was still fine when the car was scrapped at 325k miles. Maybe the mechanic saw an opportunity.

I would guess none. What you describe is not "stuck in gear" but no drive. No recall and unlikely to be one for clutch problems on 9 year old vehicles given they even refuse failed clutches in the first years warranty citing them as wear and tear. If you rely on others to work on your car and drive a nearly 10 year old vehicle you will have expenses, many of them unnecessary, no point looking to the manufacturers to stump up.

It is supposed to be flat, the pictures bely what you are saying there is plenty of material remaining above the rivet heads. The central radius band of the friction material (the unpolished section) has not even bedded in yet. Have you greased the control loading cam yet?

The long term average, what you are calling the continuous ongoing average will be affected if your current journey profiles consume more fuel than before, if it feels planted then you are likely driving a bit quicker to appreciate it. Also the mechanics may have done a very long test drive driving it like they stole it which would mean the car was handed over to you with a super low long term average, in reality short term since the battery reconnected and all the driving done by them, was the fuel tank down and the mileage up? I would reset the long term average now or when you revert to your normal driving profile. To answer your question having a low long term average will not reduce the individual trip average, an individual trip is one more than 90 minutes after the engine was last switched off, any less and its calculated as a single trip.

You were unwise to trust any mechanic who cannot diagnose a fault and wants you to pay for him to replace multiple parts. Its likely not your car constantly giving you work but the mechanic creating it. I have no idea what alleged gearbox fault you think that you have after watching the video, please don't record another one as it is very dangerous but simply explain what you percieve the problem to be please. Fans running and engine seeming to run hotter is indicative of a DPF regeneration.

That is incredible, not only that he managed the manouevre but that when finished there was zero space in front or behind 😯 Look at the state of the bumpers on the other 2 cars! They were like that before he did his deed.

From what he has written that is the case, the regen finally was able to complete. However far from leaving him in a joyous situation it leaves the worrying question of why a regen took so many motorway miles, the ideal conditions, to initiate and complete. From being aware of a regen initiating or the one time the dashboard said that I had to drive the vehicle to initiate one it has never taken more than 4 or 5 miles under the right conditions to complete. The dashboard warning was when I was doing the write off repairs, lots of start ups and moving in and out of garage etc with no driving. That regen would have had more soot to burn than a scheduled one yet still completed between junctions 10 and 11 of the M23, - 7.5kms, I would say it had completed within 5km, maybe add a couple of kms getting there but I doubt the conditions were right till the motorway.

On what planet?

And mine is even less than that! I wasn't criticising you, I had my clutch self destruct the week I moved here, I had no tools, no transport was rough camping in the abandoned building I had bought, no water or toilet, I git royally shafted by a garagiste recommended by a so called friend, the proposed €120 plus parts I felt was a come on and I got taken for €1500, I had no choice and the worst thing was I could see exactly where it was going, I had intervened for many others when garages played the same games, but could do nothing about it this time. I was simply shocked at the bill and that others including yourself did not seem to be, I have been away 20 years in a couple of months and am clearly out of touch. The clutch replacement on the MK1 Octavia was the first and last time I had ever used a garage.

Not true, he was paying monthly, he thinks they have stolen his payments but his vehicle was covered while he was driving it and making payments. It is akin to me insuring my car for a year and choosing monthly payments, selling the car after 6 months and then expecting them to pay me back the monthly premiums that I had paid. If he wants a service plan on the new vehicle he can pay for one as he did on the last vehicle, I note that they did in fact refund his payments, he has had his cake, eaten it and got the money back and seemingly is still not happy.

They are ok for setting idle mixture but not for cruising or full load, also you really need 4 of them and they dont spark anywhere near as good as a spark plug under lean burn mixtures.

A lot of contributors are overthinking this. It makes absolute sense that a single carb 4 cylinder in line engine would have different combustion mixtures on the inner and outer cylinders, one glance at the compromised inlet tract lengths will show you exactly why. I would however have expected the outer cylinders to run leaner with fuel condensing on the manifold walls. I can see that its a X flow engine so does not have a hot spot joining the inlet and exhaust manifolds which usually favours the inner cylinders, does it have a water heated inlet manifold or a thermostatically controlled exhaust heated inlet to the air filter? These are all things to check. The other thing is that spark plug colour is a very good indication of combustion conditions but only if the test is done under the correct conditions known as a "plug cut test". For a race engine this will be done when under sustained full load, either on a dyno or test track, for a road car its done at a fast cruising speed with the engine at full operating temperature, after a couple of miles at a constant cruising speed on the flat with a constant throttle opening you declutch and switch off the ignition, you cruise to a halt and then check the plug tip colours wearing gloves or after having had a pint if you can coast to a pub 🤣 It sounds like you have some work to do if its not firing on all cylinders on start up, you were right to confirm the compressions before anything else.

There is a mobile clutch mechanic that films his jobs and puts them on Youtube, he works on his back with a trolley jack and the car on axle stands, his videos are not editted, he shows the whole job but with some bits on fast forward. Clearly he knows his stuff and could probably work blindfolded, he does a 2WD VAG clutch in about an hour I reckon allowing for the speeded up bits and the bits not shown like jacking up, letting down, road test, handover etc, maybe 90 minutes on site, I know he does at least 4 a day dependant on how far he has to travel. I reckon he could do a 4wd one in 2-2.5 hours, laying on his back! without a vehicle ramp. He may even have released a video of it now.

Because you wanted to know.

It would be helpful if you could list the parts they invoiced, it might also shed some light on your perception of how it now drives. It stills leaves the labour at £200 per hour inc vat and double the hours the job actually takes although I don't doubt that the book time is 8 hours. Are garage labour rates now £200 per hour?

As a professional what? I thought a professional electrical engineer till I read the above, so what do you consider your profession to be now?

They would not have, its the other end of the car. They may have removed the steering rack, the book says to but even with no experience I could see that it would be better and quicker to leave it on the vehicle, disconnect it from the subframe and leave it supported by a couple of bungees. MPG loss from having working 4WD, somewhere between nothing and imperceptible, it only delivers power when required to, when the front wheels spin or could spin, most of the time the Haldex is only engaged by 5%, basically slipping to avoid transmission wind up, the losses are from the front bevel gearbox, from spinning the propshaft and Haldex clutch basket and hauling the extra weight around, your vehicle would have been doing all of that even if the Haldex was not able to engage.

That is the other end of the car, they wont have worked anywhere near it. £2800 for a presumably replacement clutch and slave cylinder on a petrol engined Yeti is an absolute rip off, am I the only one to be shocked by this? From the lack of comments I get the impression that is what people are getting used to. There is not even a DMF to replace on the petrol engine, my clutch kit including slave cylinder and DMF cost €300 including delivery, the job took me 2 leisurely afternoons as I did not know what I was doing, I could do one now using a ramp comfortably in under 4 hours. The garage I was considering having do the job wanted 16 hours labour 😒, they are cheap, they want the customer to supply the parts and pay cash so it is all undeclared work, they may seem cheap per hour but not when they bill 4 x as long as the job takes. But £2800, I am still reeling from that, its as much as I paid for my Yeti.

Ex Taxi.

Yes its very easy to have the vehicle crabbing afterwards but that would not increase the fuel consumption and you would be aware of the car pulling to one side and having to turn the steering wheel off centre against resistance to drive in a straight line. My initial thought is they did not reconnect the MAF sensor when putting back the airbox but that would bring up a MIL light, check they havn't done something silly with the intake pipes and air filter. How much did they touch you for?