Phutters

. Pah. I went to see the dealer this morning and they said they might need it for two days. I resisted the temptation to ask them why they needed to drop the engine and replace the big end shells to update the MIB software. Other than the slightly surprising estimate of how long it might take, they were more than happy to check the TPI situation and do the dirty deed. Which reminds me to ask them not to wash it with the works sponge afterwards. I'm beside myself with excitement at the prospect of using an up-to-date satnav. I'll have to think of somewhere new to go. .

That’s very helpful. Thanks 👍

For some unknown reason my car (MY21 Karoq with Amundsen MIB3) won't do online map updates like I think it should be doing. It also won't do online destination imports using either the MySkoda app or the Connect portal, though that might be a separate unrelated issue. I have a live Connect license; all the permissions are correctly set and we're hooked up to the 'net whenever the ignition is on. Everything else that should work does work. The current map database is 21.1 and the MIB is running on the 0270 software version. Customer Services aren't much help, bless them - all they can really suggest is visiting the dealership. I'll do that if I have to, but I couldn't see any harm in trying the manual map update first (assuming that 21.1 is indeed out of date). I know what's involved in this manual update malarkey, but I don't know how long the fully-loaded USB-C flash drive needs to be plugged in to the car for the MIB to pull the update on board. Is it hours, or days, or months, or what? Has anyone else cracked this? It isn't a massive deal in the overall scheme of things - I can use the satnav as it is now or if it gets me hopelessly lost I can use Waze or Google maps on CarPlay instead. If none of that works I can get Mrs Phutters to poke her sextant out of the window and do it the properly old-fashioned way. I'm fuelled by both curiosity and the fact that I'm paying for a Connect license which is not doing what it says on the tin, at least in part. Thanks P.S. Customer Services are looking into the destination import issue on a separate ticket. They've been looking into it since the middle of October, actually. Periodically I'll get a nice email from the case manager saying that the factory boffins have twiddled a knob somewhere and could I try it again, because they think they've fixed it... .

. I don't know if this helps... I use an iPhone's hotspot (and a cheap Smarty unlimited data SIM) in a 2021 Karoq with Amundsen MIB3 to stream Deezer HiFi and had a bit of trouble getting it to connect reliably. The phone always shows in the relevant locations in the MIB settings - and would play downloaded tracks from its internal memory using both wired and wireless CarPlay - but it was occasionally greyed out and wouldn't always allow the car to connect to its hotspot. The answer - for the time being at least - is to disable and then re-enable 'Allow Others to Join' in Settings>Personal Hotspot on the phone. The only limiting factor now is a poor signal from time to time when you're out in the sticks. I just accept that this kind of stuff is flaky. It's a walk in the park compared to what a pain in the backside WiFi was two decades ago, mind you. It drove me to distraction so many times back then I'd have cheerfully eaten my own arms. .

. Menu>settings>system information .

You're right. It is tight. Were fortunate in having a mover, so rather than use the handbrake I cheat and creep the van back until it's almost moving the car. That extends the damper all the way and prevents anything unexpected. Hopefully. .

Enough clearance in what particular regard? I've got a Karoq with the factory-fit drop-down towball, and use an AKS3004 on it with no issues at all. This is from AL-KO's FAQ: I have an AKS Stabiliser. What is the minimum clearance that I need between the towball and towing vehicle? This varies according the the stabiliser. AKS 1300 = 65mm AKS 2004 = 67mm AKS 2007 = 60mm AKS 3004 = 68mm This measurement is taken from the centre of the towball to the nearest point of contact with the towing vehicle. Insufficient clearance will prevent the stabiliser from correct articulation and could damage your car or possibly become detached. The only other relevant clearance dimension is vertically from the centre of the ball to the neck of the hitch below it, as shown here:

. I'd like to know the answer to this too. I've got precisely the same issue you have. Everything is set up correctly - all permissions, privacy and all the other cobblers you need to make this work - but trip destinations sent from either the MySkoda app or the Online portal simply don't appear in the car. The car is a 2021 Karoq with an Amundsen system, and I don't have a Connect icon on the MIB screen either. All the destinations I've sent (and there have been lots, admittedly most of them the same place) have just disappeared into the ether. It isn't really a big deal, because I can easily manage without this jolly clever feature, but that isn't really the point. It should work, but it doesn't. After several phone calls and e-mails to a very helpful chap at customer services over the past few weeks I'm no further forward. I've been told the boffins at HQ are looking into it. In the meantime, I'm getting on with my life and will resort to using a map book or rolling down the window and asking passers-by where places are, like we used to do in the last century. .

I don't care much for mudflaps from an aesthetic point of view - they look pants, especially the rear ones - but I accept that they serve a useful purpose. Not for keeping mud and cowsh*t off the car, because a hosepipe will do that. I fitted front flaps to our previous A3 because it was picking up stone chips on the rear alloys. None on the front, just the rears, and on both sides. Rudimentary logic suggested there was a pretty good chance that they came from stones flicked up by the fronts. It's the same kind of logic that probably explains why you're more likely to get a rear wheel puncture than a front one - a self-tapper lying in wait is picked up by the front tyre and goes point-first into the rear a split-second later. The kosher Audi front mudflaps were pretty discreet - as are the ones now on the Karoq - and since they didn't cost much, it was worth a try. So far so good. It's a balance of function over form I'm happy to settle for. I can do without white worms from alloy nicks I haven't noticed because the car is usually filthy at this time of year, and I've got better things to do with the half hour of daylight we are getting now than spend it freezing my t*ts off with a bucketful of soapy water. .

Thank you. Without wanting to drift even further off course, we only found out how intact Mrs Phutters' dad's B17 was after it fell to earth by itself courtesy of a Belgian bloke who got in contact with Mrs Phutters' sister, who lives in Tennessee. Seems like he was doing some research off his own bat - for whatever reason - and managed to find a photograph of the plane on the ground which he'd e-mailed to her. It looked for all the world like a rough belly-landing rather than the result of a 27 tonne sycamore seed falling from 20,000 feet. Different times indeed...

. I don't dislike it, for what it's worth, though I do think the front end has become less distinctive by changing the shape of the grille. It's more Audi-like than it was before.

I must admit that I was ready to be a tiny bit miffed that the new one would look better than the old one, and that had circs been slightly different I might have been able to wait for the facelifted job. I'm not miffed at all, as it turns out, not least because this updated thing won't be available for yonks yet because of all the delays and stuff going on everywhere. As far as the inside is concerned, I reckon you really would have to be a Karoqorak to see any difference at all. As far the outside goes - and there isn't even a whiff of sour grapes, honest - I'm not bowled over by the changes at all. I prefer the front of the old one, especially the shape of the main grille. The new one is fussier, and it's developed a bit of a pout that it didn't have before, made more noticeable by the chrome frame on some models (less so on the all black ones, maybe). I reckon the changes to the lower grille are neither here nor there, and the squared-off upturned ends are a bit... erm... meh. I do think the new rear lights are better in that they're all LED instead of the neither-here-nor-there mix of LED and halogens on the outgoing one. I sorted that out on mine by replacing the halogen indicators and reversing lights with LEDs as many other peeps have done, and by putting a light grey film tint on the clear part of the rear light lenses. The bulbs I used weren't those ugly mega-bright things though - the ones I used were barely any brighter than the standard halogen items. I didn't want to give anybody behind me an unwanted suntan, just to have the lights snap on and off like LEDs do rather than wheezing into life like halogens. The only other things I've done are to replace the mirror indicator repeaters with the Kopacek dynamic scrolling jobs, and very nice they are too. Not cheap, but nice. As is the Kopacek black and body colour bonnet badge that's replaced the one on the picture. And in case any of you miserable 'I can't see the point of personal plates' people are cracking their knuckles ready to type something mean, that plate was Mrs Phutters' idea. Her dad was the youngest B17 pilot of the war, flying with The Mighty Eighth out of Poddington (the main runway of which is now the Santa Pod drag strip) until he was shot down over the Ardennes in the winter of 1944-5. All his crew baled out and survived, and the plane bellied itself into a muddy field, ending up quite remarkably intact for something which had, to all intents and purposes, fallen tens of thousands of feet with nobody at the wheel. The rest of the plate is his initials. He had B17 PLT on his own cars in the States, but somebody else had snaffled that when we got this one. He died about ten years ago. They threw him the keys to his B17 when he was barely nineteen years old.

. Neither this car nor any of the others I've been fortunate enough to own have ever had a complimentary wash at a dealership even though they could have. Not on your nelly. I've looked over the fence and seen the staff playing footy with the sponge. .

Likewise. I couldn't stomach paying twenty five quid or whatever it was for a replacement light unit from Superskoda though, so I got a new pcb with three LEDs on it from these people. Seven quid or so plus a few coppers for postage was much more bearable, and it's way brighter than the glow worm in a box that came with the car. The other thing was that I didn't really need something quite as bright as the Superskoda one looks to be since I'm not expecting to stage a floodlit county cricket match in the boot. Here's a comparison:

. Mr Liger's right - spline and triple square aren't the same. .

. I'm not sure if it's what you mean, but you really shouldn't mix all-seasons and summer tyres. Not a good plan at all. .

. Amazon. There's a link in the post. .

I forgot to mention - though I probably don't need to - that you don't need to take it off when you use the hitch for its intended purpose. You just turn it down out of the way like turning a cuff.

. I'd wrestled with this too, on both an A3 with the same factory-fit tow bar as the one on the Karoq I've got now. Most of the drop-down hitches seem to be these Bosal units. I'd tried various combinations of tow ball covers, plastic bags, reusable tie-wraps and rubber bands but none of them stopped the ball going rusty. It wasn't a massive deal to clean it, but I was convinced there was a better solution somewhere. As you say, the main problem lies in the hitch being stowed upside down Anyhoo, I bought two of these. The hole you'd use to fill it with water ( I can't really imagine having a ball of ice that size in a drink, but that's not what I got it for) needs to be made somewhat bigger so you can ease it over the tow ball but not so big that it isn't a reasonably tight fit on the neck of the hitch just below the ball. I used a very sharp scalpel, and once I was reasonably happy that it'd fit, warmed the rubber up to stop it splitting and stretched it over the ball. The result is shown below. Hopefully it's self-explanatory. The top is held on with Velcro cable ties. It clears the hole in the bumper - just - and thus far has stopped the ball going rusty. The photo shows the ball after several months of use. I haven't cleaned it, and there's no grease on it. It isn't an unqualified success, but as far as I'm concerned it's pretty close.

. Not being able to get my passenger side mirror to dip in reverse was a bit of a disappointment. It was the first modification I tried with Carista. It's an incredibly useful thing, and I don't really understand why all new cars with electric mirrors don't have it as standard. It's not like it would be particularly onerous to build it in, after all. Much more useful than being able to change the colour of a weedy little LED strip in the dashboard. Ambient lighting? Pah. Saving yourself the agonising graunch of alloy on kerb? You bet. .

. The garage do pay VAT on what they buy. The difference is that - as a VAT registered concern - they can and will reclaim it. BTDT .

. From Which?, September 2021: "Can you buy a truly wireless, battery-powered dash cam? No. You can buy a wireless dash cam that allows you to transfer footage without using a cable. But every major dash cam on the market connects to a car's battery via a cable – either one that's trailed to your car's 9V socket or hard-wired into the dashboard. Many dash cams have internal batteries to ensure recordings are saved in the case of a power outage, but they need that continuous cable connection to run for any practical length of time. There aren't any truly wireless dash cams out there right now, and we would advise you to steer clear of any you can find that run on batteries alone." .

. Me, Mister! Me, me! I did it! All by myself! .

. Hopeless, old fruit. Should have tried harder. Here. .