Phutters

. They look really good. Especially the door pocket liners. I'd have a set of those in a flash. As far as I'm aware you can't get anything like those in the UK, though I'd be c*ck-a-hoop if someone knows better. Does your local company have a website, by any chance? Might they be persuaded to ship abroad? .

. I don't think carnal is the word you were looking for, but the general thrust is in the right direction. .

. Nope. My 2.0TSI did exactly what Mr SurreyJohn describes yesterday. The motor died as I was pulling up to a roundabout just as an opportunity to scoot out presented itself. It's not the first time, either. It would be nice to be able to turn the start/stop off permanently, but you can't on a late one like this. Having said that, I don't think it's the massive chore to turn it off each time you start the engine that others seem to think it is. Adding one small thing to add to an already short list of things you need to do before driving off isn't that onerous - it's not as if you have to walk round checking the control surfaces, priming the carburettors, dragging chocks out or swinging a propeller. What is a pain in the panjandrum is forgetting to switch it off, because the roundabout quick-getaway dead-engine scenario has the potential to be rather more than just a nuisance. .

If you pay attention to the little arrow on the top of the can’s nozzle you should be okay.

. Nope. I drive this. That's me behind the wheel. .

. I hope you don't mind me asking - and this isn't meant unkindly - but do you actually enjoy driving? If you do, why would you want the car to do it for you instead of doing it yourself? Do you think the car can do a better job of it than you can? I must admit that if I ever got to the point where I felt the need to delegate decision-making to an inanimate object, I'd probably pack it in altogether. It's only an opinion. It's nothing personal. .

. That makes a ton of sense to me. Whenever I've been deciding what car to get, I've always plumped for the biggest and most powerful engine I can afford to run. I can't think of many occasions - none, really - when I've wished I'd got something with a smaller and less powerful one. On the other hand, there have been several when I wish I'd had the courage of my convictions and bought something with more beans. You could argue with some justification that you shouldn't ever get yourself into a situation where you needed it, but having a little bit to spare is always a good thing. .

. It's a godsend if one of the drivers - no names, no pack drill - is one of those people who suddenly can't remember whether they locked the car or not, and going back to check is a king-sized pain in the fundament. .

. I don't know how much help this is likely to be, but here goes anyway. I fitted a set of 225/45 R17 Quatrac Pros to my previous car (a 2016 Audi A3 2.0TFSI 190) about 30 months after getting it. Sod's law that in the subsequent eighteen months the weather never turned completely pants so I can't report on what they were like in snow or on ice. In most normal driving, I reckon you'd be hard pressed to notice any appreciable difference between the Quatracs and the Bridgestone summers that the car came with. There are a couple of exceptions, though I wouldn't pretend to know whether they'd be enough to colour your choice. The dry weather braking was noticeably poorer than the summers, though I think you might expect that. The braking distances were appreciably longer, and I didn't much care for the squirminess that came with it. I guess you'd get used to that, but I was left with a lingering feeling that in proper emergency braking (like nose on the steering wheel ABS-hammering type braking) that you might end up clobbering whatever it was you were trying to avoid. I didn't get the same feeling in the wet, FWIW, and they did feel more secure in extreme wet weather on the motorway than the Bridgestone summers ever did. Would I get them again? I dunno. If we lived somewhere that was more prone to properly poor weather and if we depended on the car to get to work - which we don't - then I would. Otherwise a bit of a curate's egg. Good in parts, not so good in others. If the price differential was greater still it'd be harder to justify. Told you it might not be much use... .

. Hey Rodders. You might try one of these, then. Very good. You're welcome .

. This one. .

. I use the wired connection for a reason which is pretty illogical given that the inside of any car, no matter how good its sound system, isn't really the best place to be pretending to be some sort of pseudy audiophile with corduroy trousers, a beard and no moustache. I listen to most of my choonz (that's right, init?) on Deezer HiFi on the phone, an iPhone 7, and since I'm paying for something which genuinely sounds whizzo on a half-decent home stereo through a good DAC converter I thought I owed it to myself to use the optimum way of connecting it up in the car, which is wired. I've used it wirelessly too, and to be perfectly honest I can't really tell the difference between wired and wireless, especially when Mrs Phutters is blithering on about nothing at all and our dogs are barking at every pedestrian, cyclist and motorcyclist they see out of the windows, never mind the road noise, wind noise and incessant honking from all the other motorists I've cut up while paying more attention to the built-in equaliser than the road ahead. The other reason for wired is exactly what you alluded to when using wireless. It is unstable. Unstable bordering on pants, in fact. I don't know if it would work better on a newer iPhone either, but a moving car definitely isn't the place to be faffing about turning things off and on again repeatedly. And though it makes sod all difference in the overall scheme of things, using a wired connection also means you don't get the couple of seconds lag when changing tracks or whatever. As far as Bluetooth is concerned, I did try a comparison with wired and wireless under the 'controlled conditions' of sitting in the car up the drive with the windows rolled up, engine off and me leaning over into the middle listening extremely scientifically to the same track played over and over from Deezer HiFi. As far as sound quality goes. Bluetooth is noticeably poorer than wired or wireless. But then it isn't supposed to be as good anyway.

. This might not be exactly the answer you're after, but having been down the same road as you, it might help... I used one of these to plug into the USB-C socket, which at least gives you the option of using a USB-A to Lightning to connect to your phone. One piece right-angled USB-C to USB-A like this one would work in theory (and be smaller, obvs), but while they will all charge the phone, despite all the encouraging blurb they don't always work properly when it comes to transmitting data. Been there and done that. When we got our previous Audi (which had USB-A sockets in the centre console rather than USB-Cs) I blagged one of these from the dealership. In our Karoq (same USB-C arrangement as your car) I plugged it into the flexible adaptor above. While it isn't quite as elegant as a one-wire solution, it's more than compensated for by the coiled Audi cable with its spiffy - and so far 100% reliable - swivelling connector. Everything tucks into the space next to the USB-C sockets without impeding the sliding cover. I tried the short fat cable you linked to, and sent it back straight away. It looks good, but it's too fat and stiff by half. .

. It's hideous. Mrs Phutters is from Tennessee, so she's used to it. I'm not from Tennessee, so the summers of the few years we lived there were a trifle uncomfortable. The sweat pours off you even when you're completely inert, and it just doesn't evaporate. The first car we had there - a 1981 Honda Accord - didn't have air conditioning. We drove across the middle of rural Tennessee to the middle of rural Georgia and back to get a bag of onions one summer. I could explain, but it really isn't worth it. The temperature was in the upper nineties and the humidity just as bad. Of course we had all the windows and the sunroof open, but it really didn't help. If I remember correctly we collected most of the population of large and ferocious-looking insects in the back seat en route, not all of them dead. .

. Our summertime temperatures are weedy in comparison with those in the states. Like really weedy. Over here you can get by without aircon. Over there you end up poached in your own juices and have to be sucked out of the car by a professional waste disposal operator. .

I'd take some convincing that this wasn't the case too. The longest I've had a car with aircon is the dozen years I had an Audi allroad from new, and although I probably didn't use the A/C as often as the... erm... purists say you should, it was working pretty much as well when I flogged it as the day we got it. Never had it serviced nor nowt, and neither have I had the aircon in any of the rest of the family's cars done. I can honestly say that I've never dashed my fist into the palm of the other hand and said: 'You know what? I really regret not paying such a lot of money to a dealership for something I don't think needs doing'. Now nitrogen in tyres. That's a whole different ball game... .

. Indeedy. Having nothing on that corner and a human counterbalance in the shapely shape of Mrs Phutters sitting on the diagonally opposite one would have been better. .

The standard (i.e. factory-fit) space saver for my 2.0TSI - with 225/45 19s - is a Maxxis T125/70 R18. This is a 2021 car, new in November last year. I had to use it the other week, too. Self-tapper in the shoulder of a tyre with only 1000 miles on it. £155 down the pan for a new one. It's the first time I've ever used a space saver, and I hope it's the last. It got us where we were going, but I now know why they're limited to 50mph. Even driving like my aunty Wendy used to drive the handling was like a half-set Rowntree's jelly, and the ESP light was going ape most of the time. And it looked so silly. I imagined all the people we passed were pointing and laughing, though they probably weren't really. .

Three things, for what it’s worth. Thing one: you’ll probably end up not detaching your detachable tow bar because it’s a faff, and then you won’t be able to detach it anyway because it’ll have seized in the receiver. Thing two: if you don’t bother detaching your detachable tow bar you will walk into it, and it’ll hurt like a *******, but you’ll only do it once. Thing three: leaving your detachable tow bar attached will almost certainly save your bumper from some feckless park-by-feel merchant at some point. A 50mm hole in his bumper should be a lesson, but it mostly isn’t. Thing four: spend the hundred quid on beer. Whether you do that all at once or over a period of time is a matter of conscience.

. Yep - I get this from time to time and like you, I mostly cancel it. The one time I didn't and pressed okay in a moment of blind panic, nothing happened. Well, nothing happened at the time; by the next morning the steering wheel had moved across to the passenger side. This wouldn't have been a huge deal (I lived in the States for a few years and kind of got used to driving on the right) except that the pedals had remained where they were supposed to be, and in attempting to reverse out of the drive to take the car to the dealers I contrived to get the gearchange lever stuck up the leg of my shorts and had to get Mrs Phutters to rescue me with a large pair of scissors. .

. I'd be inclined to suck it and see. I don't think there are any hard and fast rules any more. Anecdotally some peeps have waited yonks for stuff to rock up and have had to pay duty; others - like me - haven't had any trouble at all. Don't read the online reviews. A lot of disgruntled punters think Superskoda are an absolute shower and would never use them again, but I'd have no hesitation myself. I haven't had to wait longer than six or seven days for anything, but I might be lucky. My gut feeling would probably be not to commit to anything very big or very expensive; otherwise give it a bash, but keep your expectations dialled back a bit and don't start tearing your hair out if nothing happens within the first few days... .

. Does the car ask you first to make sure it's at a convenient time? I hope it does. Seems like a solution to a problem none of us really have. How on earth did we manage when we had to do things by ourselves? Things like steering, braking when something's in the way and turning the wipers on when it's raining. I dunno.

. If you rotate the wipers on the shaft splines they'll park further up the screen, and at the end of the sweep the offending blade won't be parallel to the A pillar any more. There's quite a good chance that its tip will go beyond the edge of the screen too. One spline isn't much of a difference at the pivot point, but it translates to quite a lot 26 inches away at the blade end. .

. If you mean under the bottom edge of the boot when closed, it's designed that way. If that gap wasn't there, you couldn't fit a rigid bumper protector. . If you

I think I’d try a bit of silicone spray first, or maybe a little smear of silicone grease. Vaseline does degrade rubber seals over time, and while the seals might not actually be real rubber it’s probably safer not to use it at all. Keep it for when your thighs chafe.