'Little' John

I got a quote off them last year when I was getting rid of my vRS. For a mint condition SE they were prepared to offer £6500 (before admin fees and haggling you down once you get there). For comparison my local Mazda dealer offered my £6,500 in part ex, and the place I actually got my new car only gave me £6,000 (but a much better deal overall). It depends on what you want. I reckon that it may be one of the best ways to get a good deal on a new car. If you sell them your old car and trawl the internet for the best price on a new one you will get a better deal than having a part exchange. On the other hand if you love that hassle associated with selling your car privately, nobody's stopping you....

Leaky doors, prematurely wearing suspension parts, terrible dealer service... ...need I say more.

I e-mailed yesterday evening after getting home to say I was going to take today off as holiday as I felt the roads were too dangerous. Got a reply this morning telling me that I needed to get in. If it was going to be a problem get a lift with a colleague (didn't read the e-mail till gone nine so there wouldn't have been anyone to contact anyway). Like getting killed in someone elses car makes it any better. 'Phoned up work to check if it was really necessary and got told that if I had made it home before 11.00pm the night before the roads couldn't be that bad! Drove on slush at temperatures of -11C to get to work. Okay, the roads were actually better than I expected them to be, but surely this is irresponsible...

I thought the ood were a race of mythical beings from Dr Who...

Depends how you are going to use the car. I'm 6'5" and in normal everyday use I didn't have a problem. The two types of driving that do give problems: i) Rear seat passengers. They do tend to moan. I did manage to trap one in totally with their feet stuck under the drivers seat... ii) Carrying large amounts in the boot. If you just drop the seat backs they don't lie flat. If you flip the seat bases to get a flat load area you can't have the drivers seat very far back and end up driving with your knees around your ears.

£150 sounds a bit steep, but it depends on the service. They seem to alternate minor and major. I think I paid about £80-£90 for some of my services, and about £120-£130 for the others.

It does seem a bit hit and miss. I've just got rid of a 2007 vRS with a BLT engine (obviously) and the tax on that was £110 - according to the registration document the emissions are 140g/km.

I'm SAD too! My figures would pretty much agree with yours, although I did manage to to 60mpg on one particularly boring journey from Yorkshire to Surrey and back! Over three years and 32K miles I averaged 49.7mpg before getting rid of the car.

Do a search - you'll find that it doesn't! Hence the restriction on using calculated figures.

To settle a raging argument going on in another thread, could we have a poll of the real economy that Fabia vRS drivers are getting. The figure that we are interested in is the calculated economy not any taken from the trip computer.

I think it's to do with the way that the engine picks up. As far as I know there seemed to be issues with not pulling well when people wanted to speed up to overtake but couldn't be bothered to use the gearbox. Skoda felt this didn't fit in with the 'sporty' character of the car and packed the gear ratios closer together so that it revved higher which means it's in a better place in the powerband at that sort of speed. It probably also helps the 0-60 time marginally. There's not a massive difference - I think you're looking at about 200-300 rpm at seventy in 6th. However, that is enough to have a negative effect on your economy.

They all have six speed boxes, but the earlier one's have longer gear ratios which mean they rev lower at a given speed. I don't know exactly when they changed them, but I'm sure somebody will be along to tell you soon.

Haven't done enough miles to do a calculated figure yet, but the figures on paper compare favourably with the Fabia. Mixed driving over the moors to Whitby on saturday and back via the coast road gave a trip computer figure of 55.8mpg, which if accurate is probably better than the Furby would have done on the same run driven in the same way. It probably helps that it has a sensible gearbox unlike the later vRSs. Revs at slightly less than 2000rpm at 70mph in 6th. Anyway I'm not expecting the same level of economy in a car which has twice the space of the Fabia and 180bhp as standard.

Someone line up the poor kittens and shoot them...

Yes, but the guy has said he'll be doing A and B road driving with some town roads as well. He's not going to average 60mpg doing that and if he's trying to make an informed decision, it's better that the data he gets isn't flawed by people playing the 'my mpg is better than yours' game.

Unless you continually drive by free-falling down a cliff you will not have a real 60mpg. end of.

In your dreams. That might be what the trip computer says, but it bears no resemblance to reality. I've only ever once got over 60mpg (calculated rather than from the trip computer) and that involved driving motorways at 60mph all the way. The earlier, higher geared cars may be marginally better. 50mpg would be a more likely figure to expect, although even that depends on your driving style.

OK, prize for having the longest period of Vauxhall ownership... i) 1972 Ford Cortina MKIII (actually my dad's but he had bought a new car and was having problems selling it privately so I adopted it!) ii) T (suffix) Morris Marina 1.3 Auto - lasted less than two weeks before it drank all the oil and destroyed the engine. iii) V (suffix) Toyota Starlet 1.2 iv) 1988 Citroen BX 1.4 v) 1985 Vauxhall Nova 2dr Saloon in brown with orange go faster stripe! (Came with wife attached). vi) 1992 Vauxall Astra 1.4 (replacement for BX and Nova). vii) 1998 Vauxhall Astra 1.6. viii) 2001 Vauxhall Astra 2.0 Dti / 1998 Perodua Nippa - diverged back to two car family again! ix) 2007 Skoda Fabia vRS SE / 2004 Skoda Fabia 1.2 Classic x) 2010 Mazda6 2.2d Sport - replaced Fabia vRS. Actually that doesn't look a very long list for 20 years of motoring....

Well, it's gone. I took the Fabia vRS SE into the garage yesterday and picked up my nice shiny new Mazda6 Sport. I was originally intending to keep the Fabia for longer (5-6 years) but I was disappointed in it. It was my first new car and maybe my expectations were too high. Don't get me wrong, it's a great car to drive and lots of fun, but the build quality and the dealer service:thumbdown:.... My previous car was a Vauxhall Astra. Bought at two years old with 40K miles on the clock. In 4 years and 95K miles it had the following work done (excluding reasonable wear and tear): 2 new front springs New mass air flow sensor. New Crankshaft sensor. In contrast my SE in 3 years and 32K miles: Fix for stutter. Rear door leaks fixed (3 times and I'm still not entirely convinced). Knocking/clonking from front suspension and/or steering ever since it was about 6 months old. Dealer's response was 'You have to expect some wear and tear especially with the state of the roads nowadays'. Finally did something at the last service, but looks like that involved packing worn components with grease rather than replacing them since the knocking came back two weeks later. Replacement windscreen (OK, not exactly Skoda's fault, but my brother reckons that the chip that I had shouldn't have fractured necessitating the replacement - it looks like the body shell just isn't rigid enough and flexes). Front washers packed up. This was actually a result of Autoglass replacing the windscreen and messing up the entire scuttle panel. However, the dealer's initial diagnosis was that I had used the wrong concentration of screen wash and clogged the washers (and then didn't bother actually fixing the washers). They did pick up on it on a later visit, however this probably just shows that they hadn't even bothered looking at it on the first visit. Rear washer nozzle snapped off during cold spell last winter and needed two trips to the dealer before they 'fixed' it. It now squirts horizontally, not vertically. I was hoping that buying a brand new car would give me at least three years of trouble free motoring and I've been sadly disappointed. The weird thing is that Skoda usually does pretty well on owner satisfaction and reliability surveys. Was I just expecting too much?

I just got £6K part-ex for my SE, but then I did get a very good deal on the new car to counterbalance it. I've no idea what the dealer is going to do with it or what they'll want for it...

Mine too. I've asked the dealer numerous times to look at the knocking and they keep telling me that there's nothing wrong and 'you should expect a bit of wear and tear with the state of the roads nowadays'!

Does the 'I have a clean license now' another way of saying that I've ragged the nuts off this one and want to get shot of it before something breaks terminally?

We've been a two Fabia household for the past three years .

When the vRS gets replaced by this... Sorry, but the Faba is too small, and the Octavia just couldn't make it against such quality opposition...