JayLibove

When I noticed this effect, I'd been driving for 100km or so, and the A/C had done a fine job of maintaining the cabin temperature except for the few occasions throughout the length of the drive when I'd switched on recirculate mode (due to being in a tunnel, or following a smoke-belching car or small motorcycle). And even on recirculate, it's not that the cabin got hotter and hotter and hotter; I just fairly quickly noticed the difference. (What I should have done was dropped the temperature several degrees in the moment, with recirculate still on, to see if the A/C resumed effectively cooling; but exactly these moments were times of traffic or road complexity and I was otherwise occupied). I had just earlier today sent a request to the shop for more details about the A/C repair; Spain is a place where work orders do not tend to be very detailed unless/until you demand it 🙄. Waiting for their answer.

The problem is that insurance is an actuarial statistics business, and insurance is usually very tightly regulated to avoid market abuses. When an insurance product, in the ability of the consumer to assess whether it's worth buying, is based on "Must pay starting early and must maintain over a long period of time, against the possibility of a major expense much later", but the insurance company can just decide "gee, we miscalculated", then the consumer is put in a lose-lose situation where buying a risk-mitigation product *does not mitigate the risk*.

All true, but I'm not sure how it relates to my specific question, which is that when recirculate is on, the system seems to choose to supply just slightly warmer air than it supplies when recirculate is off, something that I hadn't happened to have noticed before, and I wonder whether it suggests that something might be failing.

*grin* I guess I'm "friolero" (Spanish: sensitive to being too cold). Well, not really; but depending on whether the outside air temperature (which was around 35°C) is accompanied by direct Mediterranean sun, or if I'm in shadow at the time, I'll keep the cabin temperature set to cool to anything between 23° and 25°, and that's quite enough for me. I tend to dress lightly, and to some degree the already very large difference between outside and inside temperatures I guess is enough for me. I haven't tested how recirculate mode treats the cabin at far lower temperature setpoints.

My 2019 (mfr April 2020) Octavia III (Scout, 2.0 DGS-7), recently I think (because I don't use A/C recirculate often, but it's been brutally hot here in Spain lately) when the A/C is on, the cabin temperature has already reached the desired set point (e.g. 24°C), *and I have recirculate set on* (e.g. I'm driving through a tunnel and I don't want outside air), seems to blow slightly warm-ish air. If I switch off recirculate it immediately cools adequately. I hadn't noticed this during the previous four years since I bought the car new. Have you encountered this, that on recirculate when the cabin temperature is already cooled adequately to the set point, that it will a bit too aggressively avoid blowing even colder air into the cabin, but with recirculate off/ taking in (much hotter) outside air, it will cool just fine? (I'm asking in part because I noticed this, and in part because the last time I had my car in the Skoda shop for an unrelated minor bit of maintenance, they told me that they had done a small repair on the A/C under extended warranty). thanks,

I sincerely hope that this violates either consumer and/or insurance law in Spain where I live. I (per thread https://www.briskoda.net/forums/topic/505898-2020-octavia-combi-scout-4x4-20tdi-dsg-7-extended-warranty-worth-it/ ) decided to contract VWFS' "Long Drive" _insurance_ policy against major maintenance problems. It's an insurance plan, not an extended warranty, legally speaking. A requirement was to agree to contract this insurance no later than the end of the original factory warranty. So it's a bit like Long-Term Care medical insurance - you start buying it when you(r car is) "young and healthy" in the expectation that later in life you might need major care. The contract terms do include what I hope is an unconscionable statement that VWFS may unilaterally cease providing the product. Unconscionable because this puts an unquantifiable risk of a fundamental change in the value proposition of the insurance product on the consumer. I am filing a regulatory complaint in Spain about this, though my experience with Spanish regulators in various sectors has been .. less than stellar. Not sure if there's even a question to ask here about this, but if anyone has any similar experience (with VWFS just up and cancelling something that you bought on the basis of being able to continue it for years), I'm interested in hearing it. regards, -Jay Here's their actual text (Google Translated from the original Spanish): "On 14-10-2024, your contract number xxxxxxxxxx, with policy number xxxxxx, expires. We cannot renew it under the same conditions that we agreed due to the increase in costs related to the effects of inflation, which has led to a significant increase in expenses. For this reason, we are regrettably forced to exercise our right to oppose the automatic renewal of your guarantee insurance contract, as stated in point 3.4.2. of the Conditions of the same. In any case, we would love for you to continue enjoying all its benefits with the same convenience as before, so we invite you to contact your Official Dealer from the expiration date so that they can offer you new alternatives of interest to you."

So, two years on; I did decide to buy the VWFS extended warranty on my Scout starting at the end of its original warranty in October 2022. (The cost is about €28,50/month; the version that I chose extends the bumper-to-bumper warranty out to the end of the 5th year, then drops back somewhat through the end of the 8th year, then for the final two years is major components only; the price stays the same). It's already paid for itself. The water pump (of course), an A/C compressor, something that translates (my shop works in Català) as a 'crankshaft flange', the parking brake cable/handle, some kind of engine gasket leak, and a piece of the underbody armor. All of this by 60000Km. Hm.

I spent a lot of my life working either in software engineering or information security. In any product or process, there's the obvious "what it IS supposed to do" (functional requirements), and the less-obvious "what it's NOT supposed to do" (non-functional requirements). I _hope_ that in automotive engineering they think of those things (mostly, experience suggests that they do - they default for the assistive systems [when they're seeing ghosts and shrieking that the car is about to collide with something that isn't there 🙄] is to turn off and return full control to the human driver whenever any parameter is outside of the defined operational range)... But, hey, if I can magnet-stick a mirror on the *ss of my car to check out the brake lights when the (forward!) ACC has to slow down hard, I suppose someone else could re-aim the ACC sensor backwards into the engine compartment just to see what it would do 😁

OOOOorrrrrr, it would have to see allll the way around the world until it catches up with itself from behind!

My car's infotainment system version seems to be older: Device part number: 565035840 Hardware: H41 Software: 0478 Media Codec: 4101.00.0.0 Based on the information that you had posted about this update, it would apply to my vehicle (manufacturer approximately week 16/2020). But I haven't encountered any of the problems that the 0480 update is meant to fix (also, my unit does not have navigation). I notice that the hardware version in the other thread that you referenced is H31; mine says H41. And the device part numbers are meaningfully different (a 5Q... series in the other thread that you referenced, 56... in mine). Although, the image of the system information in that other thread mentions Amundsen, so I suppose I shouldn't expect any comparability of the hardware and part numbers? I tend to prefer to apply patches when they're available, but since I haven't actually had any of the problems, I'll probably leave it alone. I mostly use it only for Android Auto anyway, and that's more on my Android device than about the car head unit I guess. thanks,

Back when I lived in the US, that would have been an everyday opportunity. But ever since I moved to Spain (sixteen years ago now) I don't drive much, and I essentially never team drive with another vehicle. Interesting how our habits can change. Actually, thinkging about it, this coming Monday I might have the opportunity. I still kind of like the idea of a 1950s-era SciFi-looking think-Martian-bendy-neck chrome mirror magetically stuck to the side of the car to let me look at my own *ss 😁

Thanks for that - sorry, I try very hard never to ask questions that can be answered by R'ing TFM (and I have R'd TFM) but apparently the long-COVID brain fog is really getting me sometimes these days 😞 Okay, so, it *should* do the right thing... (I still want to test it; I wonder if there are magnetic stick-on mirrors that will hold up to 100km/hr+ speeds at least long enough to see my own brake lights? 😸). -Jay

This is hard (impossible?) to see from inside the moving vehicle (and I keep forgetting, on the very rare occasions that I team drive with another car, to ask the other drive to look at it), so I've never been able to see if for myself; I wonder - When Adaptive Cruise Control slows the car to avoid getting too close to a slower car in front, does it turn on the brake lights? I think it should, at least if the ACC slows the car more than extremely gently/ especially if ACC slows the car somewhat abruptly or very abruptly because some idiot has pulled into the lane in front going noticeably slower. My car happens to be a 2019 model year (mfr Apr 2020) Octavia Scout (2.0L diesel, DSG-7), for what it's worth. thanks, -Jay

Hey langers2k, Oh, quite the opposite - thus my wondering whether people had to threaten their dealers to get updates 🙂 Internet of things, of 1700kg things with self-driving characteristics ... what could possibly go wrong, go wrong, go wrong? (Apologies to Yul Brynner and https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070909 - Thanks! I'll check the version in my car ..

Indeed, with that clue, I looked around, and, yes, it's QNX based. (Which is owned by Blackberry; hadn't known that. Must've saved the company's life!) I searched for QNX security bulletins, and there aren't many (compared with Linux, Android, etc) though they do happen. My 2019 Scout does not have connected services, so the only time there's any chance at all of onboard software/firmware getting updated is when the car is in for maintenance - and I never got the feeling from the Skoda dealers here around Barcelona, Spain that that's something they'd even look at unless it was a formal recall. Does anybody here get software/firmware updates to any part of the car, especially the infotainment system? Do your dealers/ maintenance shops do it automatically? Do they do it if you ask? Do they only do it after you bribe/threaten them? Being an information security wonk, I'm a big fan of applying available security updates; much less of a fan of applying a constant stream of updates which usually break or change things unnecessarily, adding "features" that I probably don't want, introducing new bugs .. and having no choice but to do that because it's the only way to get security patches, because the art of actually writing quality software and leaving users well-enough alone is long dead, may it rest in peace 🙄 cheers,

I searched but failed to find if this has been discussed before (there are so many discussions about Android Auto that it's possible this is out there, but hard to find). I'm curious, are the Skoda infotainment systems (my 2019 model year/ early 2020 manufacture Octavia MkIII Scout I think has the base Bolero system, no nav, 8" screen) based on Android? That is, the actual software that runs the infotainment itself, is it a version of Android? Or is it some custom thing for car head units? The curiosity comes from the concern that, if these things are Android based, then for security/ hack-proofing reasons keeping it up-to-date (something that Skoda does not make easy) would become more important. thanks,

Hi Graham. My Octavia 2019 describes this, and has a (non-color) picture of the red warning symbol, in the section "Warning and automatic braking". Three years ago, it continues to occasionally give this warning when the human eye knows that there's absolutely nothing there. It's just a flawed detection algorithm and/or inadequate sensor hardware. At speed (over 60km/hr I believe) my car has never automatically braked for this; it will brake in Adaptive Cruise Control mode, including if someone abruptly switches lanes in front of me at lower speed, or slows down significantly e.g. to move into an exit lane - but while my car will slow down (sometimes a bit hard) in those cases, it has never triggered the red screechy "¡you're about to hit something!" warning; those have overwhelmingly been false positives (with no auto-braking), with a very few times when I really was approaching something (but already slowing without having to press the brake any harder than I already was - the car is a nervous Nelly at times); only once I actually wasn't paying adequate attention and came up too quickly on a slowed/stopped car in front of me and my car applied the brakes for me (but, I don't think that I got the red "you're gonna crash!" warning). So, it makes little sense, and it should be a lot better than it is.

Sadly, I believe that both of these are accurate, even if stated a bit simply in the article. The CAN bus is a standard, over which known protocol messages travel. Any such communication environment, if not protected by message authentication or by overall encryption preventing intelligible injection, is trivially defeated by technology. The hard work is figuring out how. Once done (which clearly it has been) then it's a cheap job of copying it. Think about the old remote garage door universal openers that thieves were able to buy, until newer, much harder to copy/predict code remote garage door openers became standard. Same problem. Heck, our OBD11 and similar devices more-or-less prove that our cars are vulnerable to these things. Plug in a device that has no secret knowledge from the manufacturer, and it can perform all kinds of things; it may not be able to tell the car "disable alarm, start engine" but that's only because it's not programmed to. Once someone figures it out, the cat is permanently out of the bag, until a new lock is put on the bag... Or, the replacement of the once-venerable "DES" encryption algorithm - strong enough for military and government use ... until computer technology advanced enough that it could be broken in a few hours on a $1000 retail PC. (So now we use AES-256 which is several orders of magnitude more computationally expensive to break, and should be good enough for another decade or so .. or until quantum cryptography becomes practical at that scale...). So, the original question: is VW group/ Skoda CAN bus protected against this, either by the car's computer systems performing message authentication or by having all communication on the bus signed? Or are our cars vulnerable? Actually, almost surely our cars are vulnerable, as my OBD11 example above suggests; if the cars' computers required authenticated messages or encryption, OBD11 couldn't work.

Per this article, https://www.actualidadmotor.com/en/most-stolen-cars-spain/ in 2019 6 of the top twenty stolen cars in Spain (where I live) were VW group cars (VW, Seat, and Audi); I imagine that a lot of these parts are interchangeable. I've worked in information security for decades. The reality is that once a type of crime gets easier, more of that crime occurs unless something makes it unlikely to pay or makes it more likely that the criminals will get caught. Stealing a bunch of types of cars just got easier. Alarm and key defeat, no noise, little fuss; five minutes (or less) in a dark garage or shadow, and the car starts up and the thief drives it away. We probably have to worry about this more now than we did up until a few months ago.

Easier ways to steal a car than to buy an inexpensive product, break off a headlight (or in any other way at any other point on the vehicle get access to the CANbus wires), plug in wires, and thirty seconds later the doors are unlocked and the engine started?

Recent news talks of CANbus attacks by which the attacked pries off a headlight, plugs two wires into the CANbus, and with €10 of electronics, disables the engine immobilizer and starts the engine. This would be possible as long as the CANbus isn't encrypted/ messages on the CANbus don't require cryptographic validation. Anyone know whether the Octavia MkIII (2017-2020) model years -- or any/other model year ranges and other Skoda/VW cars -- have adequate cryptographic protections against this type of attack? Now that criminals are selling these devices (they're asking a few €thousand for the devices today, but it will be only months before they're available for €100, being that the technology needed is cheap off-the-shelf, and it's only the software, which is copyable, that does the clever part). https://www.autoblog.com/2023/04/18/vehicle-headlight-can-bus-injection-theft-method-update/

So, how are dynamic cornering lights different between Eco, Drive, Sport modes? Thanks for the videos and explanations!

Hm. Nobody? Beuller? Beuller? So, a different angle on this - if I can't stop the car's built-in player from reducing audio, can I at least get it to pause playback at that moment and STAY paused? I noticed (I just completed another of my cross-continent Spain-to-Germany drives) that if a phone call comes in, the car's built-in audio play either doesn't pause at all, or it automatically resumes (at ducked volume), resulting in unknowable amounts of missed audio playback...

Standard functionality apparently, as I see a lot of discussions on many different forums about this; Bolero (I think - the basic, non-high-end audio, non-satnav) infotainment in my 2020 (last of the MkIII) Octavia combi Scout, the media player "ducks" the audio if Android Auto/ Google Maps navigation issues an instruction or an alert. (I often have it set to alerts only, so it doesn't happen as often, but at least here in Spain where Google Maps _does_ know where the fixed speed cameras are, alerts happen with some frequency). All of the threads I've seen on various forums say that it's actually the audio player app which is choosing to "duck" its own audio underneath the higher-priority navigation direction/alert sound, and that if it would be possible at all to disable that (so that the infotainment player's audio volume does NOT go down) then it would have to be a setting in the player, not in Android Auto/ Google Maps navigation. So, is there a way to configure the (I think) Bolero built-in media player (e.g. playing an audiobook off of the inserts SD card) to NOT lower/duck its audio volume when Android Auto/Google Maps navigation has something to say? thanks,

The door bars thing comes from a Skoda document "Guidebook for Rescuers" subtitled "RESCUING AND SALVAGING ŠKODA BRAND VEHICLES AFTER AN ACCIDENT" (order number S00 5186 60 20). Aha, I may have misunderstood: perhaps this document wasn't speaking of an active protection system, but rather the unavoidable eventuality of reinforcing bars (static, to strengthen the car against side impacts) being forced into the doors, making the doors impossible to open after an accident: "In ŠKODA vehicles, the side impact protection consists of steel profiles. The profiles are arranged horizontally and diagonally behind the door outer panels and in the sills if necessary. In the event of a serious accident, the high-strength pipes/profiles can punch through the door panel and hook into the B-pillar (or C-pillar). Then, the door can no longer be opened." As to the good or bad of an active frame strengthening system, given that car crashes do end up in doors being unopenable naturally, I'd consider such an active system depending on the whole universe of pros and cons (weight, probabilities of different types of crashes, stronger and weaker spots on the frame, etc). But in any case it does seem that I had mis-read the document. This same document describes I think five different variants of belt tensioners (one of which is described as "reversible" and must be the one that uses the two in-my-car-empty fuse slots). It would be nice to know everything that is, and isn't, in my car. Certainly the information that the dealer provided is inaccurate (it's a generic description of mostly standard stuff plus a bunch of optional stuff not all of which my specific vehicle has). I do have a "Vehicle-specific information" report generated from my car's VIN (I forget from what website I got this), containing about 200 rows of Pr-numbers, but searching through that for "belt" or "tension" just comes up with the fact that the car has seatbelts...