Avocet

Is the 2 year warranty on the new water pump just for the part, or for parts and labour? (A lot of the cost to replace a water pump will be labour)! Might just be worth clarifying that with them. Also, although your car isn't due for a cam belt change, the belt has to come off to do the water pump. The belt itself is very cheap. Are they going to put a new one on when they do the pump? That will buy you another 5 years before the belt needs doing again.

Yes, that would work. It's a bit tedious though. As long as the last thing you do is put it into 'P', you should be fine. You just want to get to the point where the handbrake is preventing the car from moving, rather than the gearbox.

Mrs. Avocet's 2017 Kodiaq does the "phantom braking" thing on occasions. (As indeed, does my Peugeot 5008). I don't think the technology on any of these collision avoidance systems is quite ready yet, to be honest. Presumably, you have tried setting the front-assist to its shortest possible setting? That's what we did and it hasn't braked by itself since, although we do get the occasional beep from the dashboard and the sign to "BRAKE"! That, in itself, is quite alarming, but not as bad as actually applying the brakes. Obviously, they do it when they think the car is going to have a collision. In our case, there's one particular bend, which is also in a dip, so its little radar thinks we're going to crash, if we go in there at a reasonable speed. Also, sometimes, when coming up behind a parked car, intending to pull out past it, but if the system thinks we've left it too late, it will beep at us.

It was PF Jones in Manchester. All went pretty well. I arrived at the appointed hour and the guy came out with one of those "hire car" forms, to note any existing damage on the car and we both agreed on it and signed it. He also started it up and checked that there were no existing warning lights. I then hopped on the tram and went to kill few hours in the city centre. Just over 4 hours later, they called back to say it was ready. There was no new damage to the car (that I could spot). The nearside rear interior trim panel has a slight bulge in it, so the flap that covers the left hand end of the "roller blind" luggage area cover touches it when I lift it up. I imagine that's because they've added wiring and maybe a control box in there, but it's very slight and I'm picky like that! The offside end of the rear bumper looks like it might be VERY slightly further out from the quarter panel than it was, but again, it's so slight that I can't be sure. The cut in the bottom of the bumper is indeed invisible (unless you lie down). So far, I'm pleased with it.

Just had a Witter detachable one fitted to ours today. £677 all-in, with vehicle specific, coded electrics. All seems to work. It's smart enough to disable the tailgate release switch on the driver's door if the trailer socket is plugged-in. We didn't have the virtual pedal in any case. All seems to work as it should. The vehicle didn't have towbar prep but it's a 2017 car and has towing weights on its VIN plate, its logbook and its Certificate of Conformity.

I think the insurance companies are more likely to become the limiting factor than the legislators. Already, some are refusing payouts on things like flooding where DIY plumbing has been carried out.

But discussing anything with anyone who doesn't have a position (or whose position appears to change with every post) is a bit like nailing jelly to a wall! First paragraph: - given that the Kodiaq has only been out since 2017, that's hardly surprising, is it?! On a modern car, you wouldn't expect to touch a wheel bearing for 100,000 miles / 10 years! On the rest, I can broadly agree. Second paragraph: The competence (or otherwise) of dealers wasn't part of this discussion, but I've only experienced two dealers - the one we bought the car from (who were pretty clueless), and another one who did a routine service (as far as I can tell, correctly). Third paragraph: We were talking about whether headlights were set correctly at end-of-line. Now you seem to be talking about other design / manufacturing faults - of which I'm sure there are plenty, but such problems are not unique to Skoda (or indeed any manufacturer). Yes of course they're more interested in getting your money off you! But then, so is just about any other large company. I'd suggest that the pros and cons of free market capitalism are best left to another thread? Last paragraph: All very interesting, I'm sure, but not really what we were talking about!

Yes, it's a lot of cars, but of those, you need to weed out the ones that have failed on wear-and-tear issues (like tyres or brake linings) that are nothing to do with how the vehicle left the factory and are nothing to do with deliberate modifications from factory spec (which will be virtually all of them)! OK, so you don't have any actual hard evidence that they leave the factory with the headlights misaligned? I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think it's pretty unlikely. It's a legal requirement and I know our type approval authority is all over us, wanting to check audit trails for lights being re-aligned on vehicles where our work affects the alignment. Just because someone is "interested" in their car, doesn't necessarily mean they're aware of all the potential pitfalls of any modifications they might have made to it. Looking back at my misspent youth and the things I did to cars back in the day, I shudder, at my blissful ignorance of the potential dangers of some of the mods I made! People who modify cars don't always know as much about them as the engineers who designed them. (In fact, in my experience, they very rarely do)! People who don't modify their cars but neglect them, pose a different set of problems. OK, you seemed to be using the fact that lots of car mods get sold, to justify them as not being a potential danger. If that's not what you meant, what DID you mean? (Oh, and I think there's a fair mount of tax and duty raised by the tobacco industry too, by the way...). In your last couple of lines, you seem to be making the case for banning all these aftermarket mods? If so, does it include wheel spacers?

OK, if you think it makes a difference "strict" / "strictest" / whatever...🙄 I took the worst case from "strict" (i.e. "strictest" for my argument because by definition, if I talk about the strictest, then all the others must be less strict than that). Re. Daily Mail and EU: funny enough, I've sat in plenty of EU meetings, where "the EU" (i.e the Commission in this case) has taken the absolute OPPOSITE stance to what you describe! The Commission is very much on the side of the consumer in situations like this. When ACEA (the major car manufacturers' EU trade association and the likes of FIGIEFA or the Independent Garage Association are knocking lumps out of each other at these meetings, it's not ACEA whose side the COmmission comes donw on! Back in the '90s it was the EU Commission that introduced the block exemption laws and brought down the cost of cars sold by EU manufacturers in this country. It was the EU Commission that forced the "Access to the Repair and Maintenance Information" requirements on the major manufacturers. If it wasn't for the Commission, those guys would have stitched-up independent garages and DIYers like the proverbial kipper! Yes, the countries with strict rules (and indeed, the countries without strict rules) have vehicles from other countries crossing their borders. I can, indeed, understand that. And your point is WHAT, precisely? Are you trying to argue that countries that have strict requirements should not do so, in case it in some way offends motorists from countries that have less strict requirements? Or are you, perhaps, trying to make the argument that it is pointless having strict requirements because all that good work will be undone by vehicles meeting lesser requirements when they cross the border? I wonder if you understand the actual numbers involved? We can agree on the UK MOT being too lax. SVA is long-dead and IVA is indeed relatively lax, but it is intended to be the "bottom rung" of the approval scheme ladder. Personally, when I look back at the weeping and grinding of teeth that went on in the kit car industry when SVA was first introduced, I think it did a pretty good job of getting (say) the worst 20% of kit cars and specials off the road. I'm afraid I don't understand your "safety is great" argument at all. About 13% of 3 year old cars fail their first MOT - which isn't that many, considering some can do up to 50,000 miles a year. I'd be interested in any evidence you can supply about headlights being misaligned at first build though. I could pass that on to the Vehicle Certification Agency. Do you have any? And yes, I'd be against extending the MOT interval to 2 years, although I'd be willing to look at the idea of a tougher one every other year. Howevr, I still don't understand what point you're trying to make, in the context of what we're discussing? I think you missed the point on the smoking analogy. The point I was trying to make, was that just because (like wheel spacers) a lot of them are sold, doesn't mean they're necessarily a good thing!

The global cigarette market is pretty big too, but I'm not sure it's a good justification for smoking cigarettes! I'm not sure why you think "the EU" wants all cars to be factory spec, when in the same sentence, you go on to say that even the strictest country in the EU permits modification? I don't have a problem with modification as long as it doesn't compromise safety or environmental performance. I think that's probably the EU position too? Certainly in Germany, they have far stricter requirements on mods than we do, but all they really ask, is that the mods still meet safety and legal requirements. Is that really such a bad thing? If I had to choose between German speed limits and having to make sure your car was up to scratch, or British speed limits and a more laissez-faire approach to vehicle modification, I think I know which I'd prefer. And yes, I was aware of that consultation. In fact, I put in a response.

Back in the day when cars had taper roller wheel bearings, it was worth checking for play, but I haven't come across a modern one that has developed play before it has started making a noise. They often go for months, making a droning noise, before you can actually feel any play at all. By the time the play is evident, the bearing is well and truly "mullered"! Yes, we modify the vehicles for wheelchair access and other converters will also make modifications, but we have to re-approve them afterwards! (Not that the approval authorities would take much notice of wheel spacers, because they're not a type approval subject in their own right. If we fitted wheel spacers, they'd be more concerned with whether the wheelarches still covered the requisite amount of tyre circumference than anything else! They might make us do another braking stability test, I guess, (particularly if we offer it with a space-saver spare), but none of the type approval tests cover a blowout situation. Blowouts are very rare - that's why we're not all dead. I used to d a bit with kit cars, years ago, and some of the deathtraps I used to see, just left me shaking my head in disbelief. Of course, they weren't "safe", but the accident records were completely below the radar because there were so few of them and they did so few miles, so there didn't look to be a safety problem. Normally, with these situations, absolutely nothing happens. By the time the wheel bearings are worn out, it probably won't be the same owner's car anyway. It will be someone else's problem. It only ever becomes a big deal when there's a fatal accident and some accident investigator discovers it had wheel spacers (or the wrong wheel offset - which has the same effect) and puts into a report that they could have contributed to the accident. That's when the trouble starts. Not sure about the significance of the letter. It looks like one of those "Dear government agency - I know these cars are dodgy as hell and don't conform to their type approvals, but they're only for a show anyway and we're not going to register them on your roads" letter?

What happens in motorsport is irrelevant. It's not like it isn't hazardous anyway! If Skoda sell them like that and the track isn't as quoted on the CoC, they're doing so illegally. Dealers might fit them "post-registration", in which case, the dealer carries the can if anything goes wrong. How on earth do you "service" or "maintain" a modern wheel bearing?!

That would certainly be my preference. However, plenty of people do fit them, and they don't seem to die horribly! As a young lad, I put some (pretty big - maybe about 30mm) spacers on my Reliant. (Don't laugh, it was a 4-wheeled one!) and I thought it looked really cool. However, I didn't really know what I was doing, back then.

"Track", in engineering terms, is from the centre of one wheel to the centre of the opposite one on the same axle. To answer J.R.'s question, the centre of the tyre tread should be the centre of the wheel width too, measured between the tyre bead seating surfaces. Yes, there might be small variations due to camber, but for all practical purposes, the two are the same. This will only coincide with the mounting face for the wheel on the hub, where the offset is zero (ET = 0). A couple of things about wheel spacers though: 1. Already mentioned, but yes, if they're not "hub-centric", you give the wheel bolts a very hard time and run the risk of the wheels not being centred on the axles. 2. You give your wheel bearings a harder time, because you're usually increasing the leverage on them. Imagine a car with 1000mm wheel spacers as an exaggeration and you can see that he loads on the bearings goes up. Whether that translates to a wheel bearing life going down from (say) 100,000 miles to 90,000 or 60,000 or whatever, depends on how much of a safety factor was in the original design, and how much of a wheel spacer has been put on. 3. On some suspension systems (e.g. McPherson struts), it puts a bending load into the damper piston - again, reducing life and adding friction. 4. Perhaps the most serious effect, is that you change the "scrub radius" on a steered wheel. It's the distance between where the steering axis (kingpin axis) hits the ground and where the centre of the tyre contact patch hits the ground. If they're both in the same place, you have "zero scrub". Few cars are like this, because it makes them feel horrible and the steering can be very heavy unless the car is rolling. "Positive scrub" was more common, as it's quite hard to get enough space to fit the discs and calipers in, without it. Back in the day, a front wheel blowout often lead to a crash - sometimes fatal at higher speeds), as the steering wheel was ripped out of the driver's hands. This is because you get a sudden drag on the side of the deflated tyre, and because of the positive scrub, the extra drag tries to turn that wheel to full lock. Over the last few decades, manufacturers have gone to simple piston sliding calipers, and one of the reasons, is to allow the wheels to be mounted a bit further inboard. Many cars have a small amount of "negative scrub" these days, so that when you get the sudden tyre deflation (and resulting extra drag), it actually tries to steer the wheel the OPPOSITE way round the kingpin axis, thereby counteracting the extra drag, to a large extent, so you have much less tendency for the wheel to be pulled out of your hands and can stop in a straighter line. A similar effect occurs when braking on an icy road and one wheel hits a patch of ice. The tendency (before negative scrub) was for the car to steer towards whichever side had the most grip. Obviously, fitting a wheel space, stuffs-up the original steering geometry in that respect, and the car comes potentially much more dangerous. Fortunately, few people suffer a front tyre blowout in their whole driving careers. If anyone's curious and has access to it, the front and rear axle track of your car, in the condition in which it left the factory, is on Field 30 of the Certificate of Conformity.

Gosh! I've never seen that before! The things (from a homologation point of view) that limit towing capacity, are usually either brakes or hill start capability. Clearly it is capable of doing a hill start with 2 tonnes on the back, so it's unlikely to be that. At the same time, I'm struggling to believe that the 200 horse one would have less capable brakes than the 150! Looking at the two asterisks, I see it has a note about towbar prep. This suggests (to me at least!) that this is stuff-all to do with homologation, and that they're just hiding behind "homologation" as a reason. I could believe that the 200 horse one might need cooling system mods for towing, but that's not a homologation issue. Homologation is only about safety and environmental performance - both of which would be excellent, once your engine has blown up! But then again, if it's a cooling problem, how could it be OK to tow 2 tonnes?! Doesn't make sense at all... very strange....

The driver's door sticker will only quote the maximum train weight, and that would be for the braked trailer. This is particularly sneaky, as I would look at it and think "oh, it's OK for towing up to 2 tonnes".

Certainly true, but I think the article was talking about the nation's "car pool" as a whole, rather than just new cars. And yes, many petrol cars now have GPFs to meet the emissions requirements, but that's fairly recent, because unlike diesels, they don't produce much by way of particulates. (Both petrol and diesel cars produce the smaller particulates, but diesels produce more of the larger ones too). I think we just don't hear much about GPFs because they're not really troublesome. They regenerate much more easily, because petrol engine exhausts run hotter naturally.

That's pretty much the same view, isn't it? Diesels better for climate change, petrols better for air quality.

Figures published by the manufacturer not reflecting real-life usage, is not uncommon.

Yes, that's not uncommon. WLTP has made figures a fair bit closer to what the average driver can expect, but there are still discrepancies. WhatCar was one of the first to start doing this when they tested cars: https://www.whatcar.com/tag/true-mpg

Indeed, but I'm not sure what point you're making, that we haven't already discussed?

My job's a bit "niche" really. I started in the late 1980s, working as a design engineer for a sports car company. That gave me my first encounter with the world of "homologation". I then moved to work at a university for a small consultancy and test house that dealt mainly with specialist vehicles of various sorts. Just over 20 years ago, my wife got the chance of a good job in rural Cumbria where there was no car industry (to speak of) so I had to think of something I could do largely from home. Homologation lends itself to that pretty well... I now have 3 jobs, really. I work for a company that converts medium and large MPVs into wheelchair accessible vehicles (including the new Caddy, as it happens!), but I'm also paid by the industry as a whole, to monitor and lobby for appropriate changes and concessions to proposed vehicle regulations for our sector, so I work for the UK and our EU trade associations too. Converting a vehicle for wheelchair access means dropping the floor, usually, and that typically means displacing fuel tank, exhaust and AdBlue tank. That would be sufficient to invalidate the base vehicle's emissions approval. Ordinarily, that would mean us having to hold our own emissions approval for the converted vehicle, but that would be both impractical and ruinously expensive. Plus (as we found out in the wake of the VW scandal), the bloody cars we were converting, would not have met the emissions requirements anyway - even before we converted them)! Long story short, I've been doing this for a long time now, but emissions has been kept (as far as I'm able) at arm's length, which is why I have very limited direct experience of emissions testing - and I'd like it to stay that way! (It is fearsome in its complexity. There are homologation engineers who specialise in emissions and nothing else. I have to be a bit of a "jack of all trades"). We have enough trouble managing the structural requirements (seat belt anchorages, seat belts, seat strength, fuel tanks and so on). However, I do attend wide motor industry regulatory meetings, so I get to hear the major manufacturers talking about forthcoming emissions regulations, I speak to various type approval authorities (usually the Vehicle Certification Agency in the UK, but also RDW in Holland and (since Brexit) STA in Sweden, in the course of my work. Those guys are bound by various professional conduct requirements, so they can't actually "dish the dirt" on specific manufacturers and their tests, but they've said very interesting things "in general terms". Lastly, my lobbying work does, of course, mean that I talk to the civil servants (both in Brussels and London) who draft the regulations. Anyway, getting back to your story above, I feel a bit sorry for VW when it comes to CO2 discrepancies. CO2 emissions and fuel consumption are directly related. ALL ICE car engines have very similar efficiencies, so the CO2 figures and the fuel consumption figures are very close to being proportional to each other. Certainly, for all practical purposes, we can regard them as being proportional. Under the NDEC requirements, "official" fuel consumption figures were widely regarded as a joke. Few cars (VWs or otherwise) ever gave their official MPG figures. Therefore, their CO2 figures were similarly inaccurate. As mentioned previously, that's a separate discussion on whether or not it constitutes "cheating", because (in my view at least) that's as much a failing of regulation as anything else. In the case you mention above, I think the authorities were just "*&^%ing VW about" a bit, by way of punishment. Believe it or not, the EU Commission didn't have any really effective sanctions against such wrongdoing, at the time, so I think individual type approval authorities all across the EU just went out of their way o make life a bit difficult for VW. That's now been addressed though. In the subsequent raft of legislation, the EU has given the Commission the power to fine a car manufacturer up to €30,000 euro per non-compliant vehicle and the recalls scheme (which was really only ever used for safety issues), has now been extended to cover environmental non-compliances. Plus, of course, advances in emissions testing equipment technology, has made "lab grade" gas analysers small enough to be portable so they can now do "real" emissions testing on a real road. Anyway, best get some work done...

OK, I guess a tuning box / remap / chip might be able to do something with that. Whether they could get it much better than Honda did, is a different question, but yes, I could see how it might get a bit more power.

I've only skimmed through them, but it looks like both stories are about them cheating on NOx, rather than CO2.

I'm afraid I don't "buy" the "reduce component costs" theory - not for a minute! An AdBlue tank is dirt cheap! The gubbins inside don't need to change with the volume. The expensive bit is the dosing pump, and the heated lines and purge system, They stay the same if you make the tank bigger. The tank itself is just a big "Tupperware" pot. As for Winterkorn, I hope he enjoys his "porridge"! I didn't buy the "rogue engineers" story either, when he came out with that. Just chucking anyone he could think of, under the proverbial bus in an attempt to save his own ass, I think. Fortunately, the judge seemed to see through that one. Quite why Skoda's execs would "want" to look like that, is beyond me?! Their best hope, I would have thought, would have been to play dumb and say they bought the technology in good faith - which they may well have done. However, Skoda will hold their own emissions approvals and some poor homologation engineer's name will be on them! However, I think you're still confusing NOx with CO2? They were caught fiddling the emissions test with regard to NOx. Nothing to do with CO2. It's certainly true that pretty much all manufacturers used to exploit the weaknesses of the old NEDC test procedure in order to get the best possible figures. Whether that's "cheating" or not, is an interesting debate. There's no point in over-inflating tyres on a rolling road, if anything, it might even make things worse, as it increases the gearing slightly. The "cheating" used to get done BEFORE the rolling road test, during the "coast-down" test. During the rolling road test, the rollers have to be "weighted" to simulate the resistance to motion of the car you're testing. To get the "inertia settings" for the rollers, you need to carry out "coast-down" tests on an actual vehicle. This is where you get the vehicle on a test track and get it up to a specified speed, then knock it into neutral and let it coast down from that speed to a much lower speed and time it. You do that several times and average the results. That takes everything into account - aerodynamics, rolling resistance, etc. There's a formula to put the times into, which gives you the required settings for the rolling road. THAT'S where the "cheating" would go on. The regs specifically demand that tyre pressures are checked, so I think that one's probably an urban myth, but manufacturers certainly used to produce "hypothetical" models that were road-legal, but that they would ever sell - for example with only one door mirror to reduce drag, or with no radio to save weight, etc. I've heard various tales of taking the grease seals out of wheel bearings and filling gearboxes with 3-in-1 oil, to reduce drag, but have never actually seen it being done. As for putting oil in the diesel, the test labs put the fuel in the car for the emissions test. They have to use "reference fuel" (the formula being tightly specified, but it's basically a particular point on the range of permitted values for EN590). To be honest, I'd have thought chucking some engine oil in there would have made emissions quite a bit worse! Not sure about the rest of the conspiracy theories, to be honest. VW owns Bentley, but BMW owns Rolls Royce.