ArisaigDavid

This has been covered quite a lot in the past. I had the same problem, and found that it was caused by loose change in my trouser pocket pressing against the boot-opening button on the key fob when I knelt, crouched or sat down. To close the boot the key needs to be within two metres of the car, but to open it you can be a considerable distance away, and even inside a building. The opening button sits slightly proud of the fob surface, unlike the other two, and there seems to be three ways of curing the problem - take the key apart and file off the projecting lug on the back of the button so that it doesn't work at all, the key in a Faraday pouch as soon as you've locked up (and taking it back out when you need to use it, which sort of negates the benefit of the Kessy principle) or doing what I did, which is to wrap a bit of felt around the key to prevent rattling and then put it in a hard container, in my case an empty WH Smiths box of drawing pins - the key still works from inside my pocket, and the boot has not opened itself in a number of years now. I hope this is the cause of your issue, and that this helps, but I am aware that there are a number of other possible causes that require the advice of more technically-gifted minds than mine.

I don't know if this helps, but I had a Warrantywise policy on a previous car some years ago and needed a new front shock absorber. Their view was that if only one shock was faulty it was covered, and they would pay for both to be done on that axle for safety reasons. However, if both were faulty it was down to bad roads or bad driving and they wouldn't pay out.

I'm not going out in the rain to check, but I think that the temperature setting with aircon on only goes down to 16C. If the display is showing "LO" then the aircon is off and outside air is coming straight through the vents, at ambient temperature in this case. It is not, therefore, a sign that anything at all is wrong with the aircon. I'm sure I will be corrected in short order if I am talking nonsense!

I'm not technical, but could it just be the auto-hold brake coming on?

That's a dangerous request in these strange times. The male voice could be a female voice self-identifying as a male voice, but whatever voice you get will send you up the same blind alleys. No offence intended to any persuasion at all !

As far as I know it comes in two forms, ready-to-use and concentrate. I have always been able to buy it from Tesco in Inverness, so try your local one. It always wins its category in the Auto Express tests.

In reply to Tin82, that was a thoughtful suggestion but, no, I don't have a trailer hitch. In reply to your view, Bap33, of my answer to KenONeill's posts, he was misreading what I've said and then seeming to try to make me out to be some kind of simpleton. I'm sorry if you feel that my response to that was "sharp". I know full well that this community is trying to help me, and has been of great help on a number of occasions already, for which I am grateful. I hope that I have been of some small help too, in the past, and I started this thread in the hope of keeping you all from being caught out by safety features being turned off - the whole wipers thing was merely an introduction to that main point. It does look most likely that xman was on the right track, and maybe something happened as a result of the dashcam being hardwired in, so a thank you to him. I would therefore like to modify my original suggestion to read - "We should all check the safety-feature settings in Columbus every time the car gets back from the garage."

Please read what I have actually written before making any more remarks.

Funnily enough, it was in the garage a month ago getting the new dashcam hardwired to a permanently-live fuse, but I have the (perhaps false) feeling that the rear traffic alert has been quiet for longer than that. Whatever the case, why is it possible to turn off these safety features at all? Incidentally, the wife assures me that she still loves me and couldn't live without me, so it can't be that.

I am perfectly aware of how this works and how to use it. Maybe I'm the only person it doesn't suit, or maybe mine is the only one with a system in need of calibration, but I just couldn't get on with it at all - at night, with drizzling rain, the windscreen is uncomfortably obscured either with manual intermittent or automatic operation, except when it decides to imagine monsoon conditions and wipe like crazy. The windscreen has not been dirty.

One of us is being a bit dense here, and I don't think it's me. My car has an intermittent wiping function with four selectable speeds, which can be used with automatic rain-sensing function if required. It also has continuous wiping with two speed options to which, as far as I can determine, the rain-sensing function does not apply, except that on about four occasions in the last four and a half years it has decided to temporarily apply it of its own accord.

I cancelled that nonsense right at the beginning - I come home in the car, lock up, the wife needs something from it and the seat motors into her position, and vice versa. A complete waste of battery power and seat motor lifespan, when there's a perfectly good set of numbered buttons on the side of the seat for when we really do need it.

This car has too much electrical cleverness, which doesn't always work very well. Instead of a perfectly good variable intermittent wiper, for example, it has a rain-sensing system which never matches wiper speed to amount of rainfall. One kind soul on this forum told me how to switch this off in the menus and use it manually, but even with that the fastest intermittent speed is too slow in many situations where the continuous setting is too fast (how Skoda, and presumably the VW group in general, managed to conduct hundreds of thousands of miles of testing all around the world without noticing this is beyond me). The curious thing is that automatic rain-sensing mode occasionally re-selects itself, which it obviously shouldn't, but even more oddly the continuous-wiping will occasionally start varying its speed according to rainfall, which shouldn't even be possible! This is only an annoyance, caused by manufacturers replacing something which worked perfectly with something that doesn't. However, something happened last week which is of far greater significance. I was reversing out of a supermarket parking space when a car drove past behind me. I am cautious enough for this not to have caused a problem, but it dawned on me that the car used to give a warning of this and, thinking back, it had been quite some time since I had heard that warning. When I got home I turned on Columbus and went into the appropriate menus, to discover that not only had it de-selected this option but had also turned off the blind-spot monitor. Now, these could be considered safety-critical features, in a way that rain-sensing wipers might not, and perhaps should not be turn-offable at all, let alone for the car to be able to turn them off without telling me! I would suggest, therefore, that we should all check the safety-feature settings in Columbus on a regular basis.

I've finally twigged this whole gooseberry thing. Apples vs. pears is an oft-used analogy for trying to compare completely different things. Oranges vs. lemons are too similar to be used in that way, and doesn't really work. Gooseberries, however, don't fit in with any of the other fruit groups used in the original post on the subject and I now see that they were only included as part of your five-a-day. In that role any fruit, or indeed vegetable, would do - brussels sprouts, for example, which could also be used to produce the raspberries mentioned two days ago.

See what I mean about gooseberries?

What have we started? Eventually it will be noticed that this has nothing to do with Skodas - I'm just waiting agog (or possibly goosegog) with anticipation to see what fabulous topic the moderators will move this stuff to!

This is something that could probably be made to go on forever, but I have the feeling that my wit may not be a match for yours so I will desist. My father was from Tayside, but it was raspberries round his way - at least you can blow those.

Gooseberries tend to be unwelcome in most situations.

Please remember that the decibel rating is measured from outside the car as it drives by, and probably bears little relation to the noise level inside the car.

I can't work out what sort of race this was that didn't involve kickdown - did it start with both of you at maximum revs in top gear?

Two great answers - thank you both very much.

This will probably seem a stupid question with an obvious answer, but how do you get these centre caps off without damaging either them or the wheel?

Evening all, I'm hoping that somebody can give me some advice. I'm considering a dashcam plus rear window camera, to be fitted and hardwired by a local garage, but there are three concerns in my mind :- (1) I'm sure I read somewhere on here that the cable for the rear window camera has to go on one side of the car and not the other, to avoid interference with the radio or something, but I can't find it. (2) A bit of online advice on a stockist's website was that I must make sure that a dashcam would not interfere with the function of any camera or sensors located within the mirror housing on the windscreen, and said to consult the car's owner's manual - it would take a better man than me to even find such a thing in the Skoda manual, let alone understand what it might say, so does anyone have any knowledge of this? (3) It would seem that, according to UK law, nothing attached to the windscreen must protrude more that 40mm into the area swept by the wipers. On a Superb, the wipers sweep the entire screen apart from tiny areas at the top left and bottom right. On that basis I cannot fit a dashcam. Also on that basis, the mirror/camera/sensors housing and the sunshades are illegal too! Does anyone have a view on this? Thank you, in advance, for any help you can give.

I'd be interested in the replies this question generates, because in all my years I've never had a car with front foglights effective enough to be worth switching on in the first place - all they've seemed to do is light up the fog so that I can't see where I'm going! Are you concerned about effectiveness in fog, or just appearance?

I must admit to an inability to understand the need for this thread, fascinating though it is. These are Kessy keys, so they will either be in your pocket (possibly in a pouch as per newbie69) or on the mantlepiece when you get home - either way, you'll never see any scratches. In Hdsn555's case the scratches are probably caused by all the other keys attached to it, and any replacement will soon get just as scratched in the same way. I keep mine in a rigid plastic case so that it doesn't get squashed and open the boot every time I bend over or crouch down for something. This means that I can't see if it's scratched, or attach other keys to it anyway. I'm just worrying that I might be missing some critical issue here. No offense intended to anyone - just wondering.