rum4mo

I even bought a tool made by Laser Tools to "yank" rear light clusters off VW Group (and other) cars, the similar aged VW Polo has a horrible special big screw that holds the rear clusters in - not as easy to remove as the plastic wing nuts on previous version of Polo, plus access through the hatch in the trim fabric is not good even for people with small hands. For previous models of some of these VW Group cars you could buy a replacement gasket for the bulb mounting section, SEAT seem to use Valeo to make their rear clusters and when you add in some "classy" shapes, the end result does tend to require an application of clear sealant where the plastic parts are meant to have been heat welded in production.

In any VAG cars that I have had with that button, I've always assumed that its sole purpose was to lock/unlock the doors from you sitting in the driver's seat, and to only operate the first stage of door locking and so leaving them NOT deadlocked. That button, so me has become more useful now that cars are being sent out with "anti carjacking" enabled, ie global locking when moving away and staying locked until individual doors get unlocked by opening them from the inside - something that you would not be able to do if they were deadlocked - as well as the motion sensor triggering the alarm on cars fitted with a car alarm. Maybe something that you don't know able yet is that you can lock any door that does not have a key lock by removing the soft rubber bung from the rear facing door surface and flicking the manual locking that hides under that soft rubber bung - then closing that door, though that is meant as a back up for if the central locking system fails or the battery has failed or has been removed.

I just never worked out why VX never tried to keep or lure Ford buyers in, from far too long the marketing side of VX has been its worst enemy. Ford lost me when it repeatedly, or its sales people repeatedly informed me that "5 speed gearboxes were just a fashion fad" followed maybe a year later by informing me "multi valve petrol engines will never take off", then tried to get me into a rear wheel drive car (Sierra) as that was what proper drivers liked, and no chance that any cars would be 4X4 "very soon", so in late 1991 I accidentally walked past a VX showroom who had just taken in a 6 month old Cav GSI 2000 16V 4X4 which had a 5 speed gear box - so ticked all my boxes, and so I left Ford for ever!

I think that you wrote that "the wrong side round" - the big issue was needing to unlock the only door with a lock barrel and then squeeze across into the driver's seat and get the key into the ignition. I'm just commenting on that so that if you correct that it will make more sense to future readers, that is all. One other thing about this "change from what went before" I was always of the opinion that with any car from any marque that came with remote central locking, if the remote fob failed, you would get global unlocking and locking from using the single key barrel door lock available, and if the central locking system failed - or the car battery failed, that single key barrel would always unlock that door mechanically/directly. Maybe I've always been wrong about the global unlocking/locking though - I should check both our cars wrt that! Also, from another poster, I've never just taken any pictures to be a true reflection of all cars, I even think that VAG handbooks at least used to make it clear that pictures will only be correct for LHD cars and the usual comment about "not all cars will have all features shown".

@xman, are you saying that in your Superb MK3, that the bonnet release is NOT blocked when the doors are closed? That is strange, my old 2011 Audi S4 has its bonnet release blocked when the (driver's) door is closed and so does my wife's 2015 VW Polo, though I will openly admit that initially I thought that there was an issue with that S4's bonnet release as sometimes it worked with very little effort and sometimes it was "solid" - obviously my error coming from a 2000 VW Passat 4Motion, the times the S4 bonnet release was "solid" would be when the driver's door was still closed!!

I am not and never have been a VX fanboy, but that VX Cav GSI 2000 16V 4X4 was a very good car, I had it for over 8 years and the factory order VW Passat 2.8V6 4Motion that I replaced it with was less than half the car that GSI 4X4 was, my 2011 Audi S4 is probably better than that Cav GSI 4X4 was, and I should hope so too as it is 20 years newer! I used to have to drive a similar aged VX Cav 1.6 as a pool car at work, and it was a complete dog in every way, no power steering and "not nice" brakes.

I'd think that comment you made does answer my question as it would be very strange for a VAG car to have a lock cover fitted that did not have a cut out for removing it, if there was a proper barrel under there.

I worked from first principles, ie I looked and worked out what the inner to outer height difference was, what the width of the slot needed to be as initially I ended up ripping some of the stone guard paint off the Polo sill when I first used the S4 version of my adaptors - there was a profile that made the sill wider somewhere along the length I was using as extended sill protection. The jacking point protectors from the Golf R of a similar model to at least the 2019 Leon, for the rearward ones just pushed into a hole in the body very much in the same way the Audi TT ones fitted the Polo and so Fabia, the frontward one needs a section of the under cover removed, the frontward Golf R insert fitted into the body, then a modified cover, ie from the Golf R fitted in place of the original Leon one, so I'd think the same for Octavia if you felt the need to do that. All these VAG cars have the underside fairly well covered in plastic cover - I think that the first time I used my wide and long adaptors on my S4 that the edge of the plastic covers made a bit of noise, but no permanent damage occurred, same for Leon Cupra - maybe a "balancing act" ie offering a bit more protection to the structural metal parts and causing slight cosmetic damage to the plastic under covers, it depends on which bothers you most I suppose.

Sounds like the crank case is being pressurised and that extra pressure has just found a weak spot. Now to find the root cause of that maybe.

Yes new cars can have a few assembly line or parts manufacturing errors that take some time to show up! My bought new 1988 Ford Orion Ghia 1.6 Injection, had to drive over a bit of rough road on the way to visit my wife in maternity hospital just after our second daughter was born, car cut out, I called for RAC help but they were not interested in an under warranty car, so sent out a contractor with a low loader who gave me the option, dealer or home, I chose "home" and found that the LT feed to the coil was sort of faulty, the moulding of the insulated push-on connector had covered up most of the ring contact inside it - I had washed that car that day and moved that lead as it was wedged in at an awkward angle - I had discovered then why! I cleared off the plastic that was masking most of the contact area, gave that push-on terminal a good "squeeze" with a pair of pliers and "sorted" in time for the hospital next visiting time! A few months later, when the weather got colder, I discovered that the demisters did not work, checked under the dashboard and found 2 pipes waiting to get "plugged in". My wife's 1989 Ford Fiesta 1.1 Ghia, hear a rattle in the back when it was only a year old (no warranty as it was an ex Channel Isles hire car bought by us at 9 months old and 1350 miles), found an extra threaded plate for the rear door lock assembly, removed it, started making same noise a few weeks later, same thing - eventually removed 4 or 5 extra threaded plates), still have them in the garage I think. My 1991 VX Cav GSI 2000 16V 4X4, similar cold weather issue with it, but this time it was "rear window heater not working", I removed the side trim cover and found a pair of leads still taped back out of the way, fitted them, rear window heater working okay for the next 9 years for me. My wife's 1992 Ford Fiesta 1.6Si, we had it over 4 years before there was a rattle and then something fell down between my legs, after we stopped I found what looked like a bolt for securing the steering/ignition lock assembly, ie it had a waisted neck on it but where it should shear while being torqued up, it had not - after getting back home refitted that one and found the other one was also very slack. Totqued both back up shearing the heads off as intended. (a security design thing)

I suppose with Skoda and SEAT having the bonnet release on the LHS of at least RHD cars, it does make a bit of sense to have a single key lock on that side, though why both can't be on the RHS of RHD drives like VW and Audi have beats me. Also, do some Fabias really have a concealed key lock on the RHS of RHD cars, why would they bother fitting a concealing cover on the RHS of a RHD car, I would have thought that there will just be the normal "dummy barrel" cast bit under any "covered" area of a door handle. I bought a concealing cover for the driver's door lock on my 2011 S4 but so far, after having the spray paint etc for 4 years, I seemed to missed painting the new cover in the warm weather or even cutting a slot in it so that it could be removed using a key blade if needed to.

Warning about ignition especially barrel wear reminds me about 1970/80's Ford Fiestas, Ford only ever, I think, at that time supplied a "lock kit" which was essentially a set of general parts and a set of 4 of each of the 4 disc versions that made up a lock. So the plan was to check either the lock number or as a DIYer carefully take the old barrel apart and note the number of each of the old discs and assembly the new barrel using the same "code" - I've done that a couple of times, though it was still a bit tricky if you had the space of 4 or 5 years between reasons to need to do that. At least with Ford and their Chubb locks, it was normally the softer keys that failed/wore out first, so when I got the call "dad, I can't get the key to work in the ignition!" I knew to look out the "red" master key which any smart owner never used normally as a convenient 3rd key, and it in its pristine state worked in that slightly worn ignition barrel, so we got the car back home and I bought a new lock kit so back to all keys working again!

Remember I was initially aiming to be able to lift my car and safely support it at these points while I worked underneath it, so my plan was for more than just lifting and working from the side of the car then dropping it back down again. If you only want to lift the Fabia on a strong enough point or 2 and work at the side of it, you can buy a set of 4 MK1 Audi TT "jacking point protectors" from Audi etc and fit them and then you just stuff your trolley jack under each of the 4 points and lift the car, when I'm being lazy/dangerous I just do that with the 2015 Polo, but I'd never ever work under the car while supporting it only on a couple of trolley jacks - but doing that makes swopping winter/summer wheels/tyres over very quick and easy. For more serious work, if not having the car up on 4 solid wooden ramps, I'd use the 4 Jackpoint jack stands. Edit:- I believe there are roughly similar jacking point "bits" you can buy to fit to Octavia - well at least they exist for Golf R and some people fit them to Leons so that they can feel happier about stuffing trolley jacks under them.

Well, my lifting kit is slightly more than a couple of trolley jacks, I needed to buy something that would allow me to lift originally only my car as it is covered in stiff plastic sections underneath, so jacking at another few points, maybe 4 points around the car was not an option, so I knew the easy way out was to jack at the 4 sill lifting points, using 2 trolley jacks and lifting up one side at a time and placing jack stands under 2 points at a time! I bought 2 pairs of Jackpoint jack stands, they are made up of a top plate - that I place on to the lifting pad of a trolley jack, and a sort of stool part that the top plate locates into, freeing up the trolley jacks to repeat the same on the other side. They give about an extra 14" under the sills so all the wheels end up clear of the ground/floor. The top plates have a roughly 4" raised section that has a 1/2" slot in it that is roughly 3/4" deep - so if I had just used them "as is" I'd be back to lifting essentially from the base of the folded lips, so to maximise the lift height when using them and to spread the load out along more of the lifting areas, I cut 4 pieces of 4" X 2" roughly 7" long, cut out a hole to clear the raised part of these alloy top plates, and bonded them to each of the 4 top plates, and then stuck and screwed bits of maybe 1/4" rubber on top of each side of the slot and lined the slots with thinner rubber. This worked for my 2011 S4 as both the inner and outer load bearing areas are the same "height" and there is plenty space "outside" this area so nothing else is touching the car's body. When it came to using this on my wife's 2015 Polo, I found that as it "sits" a lot higher than the S4, I needed to fabricate an adaptor to find some more height, and also the issue with the outer and inner low bearing surfaces being a different height, so again I used something like 4" X 1" with strips of a suitable height and width for the areas where the adaptors connect with the car, and again added similar rubber to the top surface areas. To keep these top adaptors stable enough on top of the adapted top plates I secured strips of steel on each of the inner and outer faces. This works quite well only as long as I make sure that the trolley jacks are in the best end position so that the adaptors all end up fully seated one on top of the other and in full contact with the car body sill areas once both sides have been jacked up. You will hopefully have less of a problem making them safe as you will get away with using only one adaptor as the lifting span of trolley jacks will take care of any differences between the ride height of Fabia and Octavia. Only one thing and that will be to end up with adaptors that fit both cars wrt the top profile, I don't think that the 2015 Polo ones quite match the underside of my daughter's 2019 Leon Cupra, but given time I'm sure that her man will come up with his own version of lifting gear as he has an old Lotus Esprit GT that needs lifting up and I don't think I'm willing to allow him to use my Jackpoint jack stands so that that car can spend 9 months a year up in the year, borrowing these jack stands for a weekend okay but not for 9 months! Edit:- I just wish that someone in UK or Europe had come up with a cheap and tough system for lifting and supporting at the sill lifting points and I would not have needed to scatter lots of cash!

I've always made sure that I've fabricated trolley jack adaptors so that the car's weight ends up on both these flat sections and never on the folded edge, it just makes good sense to me, and yes frequently the front and rear load baring areas are at slightly differing heights. Others might disagree with us but that is okay.

I'd think that it is quite possible to feel/hear the micro switch switching or changing state.

Too late now, but I'd hope that if you buy a Duracell replacement battery or 2 in a pack, from a supermarket which is one of the easiest places probably as they have long trading hours and a car park, that would fix this for the time being. VW Group have at least for the past 20 years only ever fitted Panasonic and tend to buy them from online traders and to date have not ended up buying copies or duds, normally the smart traders show an actual picture of the batteries mounted on cardboard pack and so show you the expiry date. I replaced the batteries for my wife's August 2015 VW Polo when the car was 6 years old, it just made sense to me to do that before they gave trouble - that car just has normal remote central locking, ie no KESSY. Something crazy about that car's front door door locks, normally for a car with central locking mechanically(using the key) on either front door will give you global unlocking as well as global locking and though in each case only give you a very short "alarm inhibit period" - so game over as far as climbing across the car before getting the ignition key in the lock. I'm assuming that there is no lock barrel on the driver's side front door - is that true or does it not work for some other reason? Trying to find an easy way to disable any factory fitted car alarm without digging deep is never going to be a possibility just because it is part of a security system. The easiest way round it is to unplug the alarm horn box AND unbolt it and soundproof it somewhere, but it resides under the front splash guard, so involves doing things like removing wiper arms. I was not trying to destroy you, but sometimes you need to able to stand back and sort out the root cause of problems - and in this case that was only ever going to be making the effort to buy and fit new batteries to these keys.

Well if I was messing up other people's life, like having my car alarm going off because I needed to replace the fob battery, CR2025 I'd think, I would have got out earlier the next day to when it first happened and bought batteries before heading into work, it can be easy to do the right thing.

It must be very time consuming buying a couple of fob batteries???

Quite a few owners of VCDS are listed on a "VCDS map" and if emailed might be willing to help you for some beer tokens, if they live nearby and you are willing to travel to them after changing batteries over, also maybe ask for any Carista owners near you to assist, only the technology change and a random serial number change is needed, I don't think that there exists a "Carista map" anywhere yet. Have you investigated buying Carista for continued use, I seem to think that while "battery reg'ng" is an extra cost activity, you would only need to pay for a month's "full" use of Carista and then drop back down to only being able to use it to check for faults, and back up again to "full " use as and when you needed to. Edit:- watch out though if you feel the need to move up a battery size as that will probably require you to buy a new battery tray and thermal insulator - I have done that for a 2015 Polo, but have not fitted anything yet!

Really as @UrbanPanzerhas said, I've been there done that, ie got a "proper" exhaust fabricator to repair the same thing on a 2002 Polo 1.4 16V Petrol engine exhaust, he charged quite a bit for gas and labour - and fitted the wrong size of flexi repair section, this part in that position will normally need to be welded in and the repair section will need to be of the correct grade for that point in the exhaust. I ended up asking someone on this forum to give me the exact measurements of their original flexi on the same engine/exhaust. When I had to get this work done, there was still no aftermarket versions of that exhaust section so it was VW Group or nothing and at that time and probably because of lack off any other options, the VW Group offering was VERY expensive, so I still saved some money even after needing to get it replaced twice, the second time I sourced the flexi repair section. So, if you are not going down the aftermarket complete exhaust section route, maybe put out a shout for someone on this forum to give you same measurements of their original exhaust flexi - required info is:- exhaust outer bore diameter at that point, complete flexi section length including tails to the welding points on the exhaust and the length of the fexi part only of that section. The "grade" you should be looking for is the higher temperature version and double skinned. I sourced mine from senioraftermarket I found what I needed on their website - they supply exhaust manufacturers with this sort of stuff - though there will be others doing the same thing, just make sure that you don't buy single skinned lower temperature versions for further along exhaust systems. Finally, my repairer just came up with the excuse that his mobile sales van-man did not, on that day, have a good selection of parts, so essentially, as he had the car in and probably had chopped up the exhaust, he bodged it - some expert! Edit:- looking at UrbanPanzer's second link, the term "ILOK" seems familiar - you just need the correct dimensions, even getting the rough overall diameter of the flexi part might help along with all the other sizes I mentioned, the original but wrong/unsuitable repair section fitted to that Polo, caused nasty resonances and part of the exhaust was hitting under the body while reversing up our steep driveway, that repair section was too big a diameter even at the points where the existing exhaust entered it, and the flexi section was far too short when compared with what it was on the original exhaust - so despite what my specialist exhaust builder said - these points did make a big difference!! Another Edit:- oh well, Senioraftermarket.co.uk seems to have vanished, you will need to use another source to get access to a catalogue, sorry!

As this question has been asked, I'll add in a bit more just in case you need/want to replace/upgrade that radio in the future. Quite a lot of the assembles or components as they are referred to, have CP which is Component Protection, what this means is that if you started breaking into cars and stealing any of these protected components, you would have difficulty using them or making money out of them as long as the owners had reported the theft and in theory they get placed on a VW Group banned register. So if you want/need to replace or upgrade one of these protected components, you can just buy a used one online as long as you trust where it came from, ie a written off car or from an owner, what happens next is, you book your car in o get CP removed from that "new" component, the VW Group Indie or VW Group dealership, check that component on that marque's "mothership" and if it is not listed as stolen, it will get returned to being a "virgin" unit and assigned to your car - and all will be well - but remember that the previous component can now not just get swopped back in as it is no longer assigned to that car, it would need returning to a "virgin" state and then assigning to that car. This is all just for information and does not change anything that @AGFalco wrote in the previous posting. I have managed to upgrade a radio from a non DAB one to a DAB one in my own car and the re-assigning of a used one from a scrappy went very well via my local proper VW Group Indie who has the correct VW Group tools and licences.

The trouble should be that this AC workshop/dealership site does not cover any VW Group marque cars, I've forgotten which if any car marque it was badged up for - ot it could have just been their "used car supermarket" workshop.

It tends to be a sales side of AC that caused most issues to customers, my daughter bought a pre reg Leon Cupra at a very good price and sold her previous Ibiza privately and so far has not had any trouble with AC other than accidentally when using their SEAT area on their website, accepted their advice to take her under warranty Cupra into a closer workshop - now that is not good advice for a car still under warranty as that year 2 service will never end up on the SEAT digital service record system - that sort of advice is shocking to their customers, too late now though!

I have always removed the cable from each side, by just using a screwdriver as a lever, same to refit them afterwards but clean up the ball end of the cable and where it fits into and apply some grease. Also I ease the rigid brake line up out of its clip on the rear beam, doing that and removing the cable will give you more freedom of movement to get the calliper out and cleaned up etc. I like making things easy, you will do a better job probably if you can move the calliper around a bit more, these rear callipers only have a rigid hydraulic pipe on them at that area so the less you need to force bend these pipes the batter. Are you replacing the rear discs - they tend to get nasty and rusty quickly, if so maybe consider buying new calliper carrier bolts. It has been a very long time since I have needed to replace rear discs on a Polo (same bits as Fabia) 12 years at least, so I've forgotten if you need to remove the rear calliper carriers to get enough room to fit new discs. I'll be doing that job maybe this coming summer! I tend to clean up the old calliper to carrier bolts and apply blue Loctite to the threads every time I service the rear brakes - the new pads will come with new bolts that are already coated with blue Loctite paste. For maybe a bit of overkill or smartness, consider buying and fitting external handbrake lever return springs, the ones from the original VW Sharan are the ones that I have always used.