SteveMcK

I went for the extended warranty alone, because the AA cover in the all-in package was just for the car and UK-only, no option to extend it to Europe, or even RoI. That will obviously depend on your own circumstances and where you drive, but probbaly worth considering. I went for separate personal breakdown cover, to have both our cars covered.

You're effectively pulling 200kg of extra battery weight for no good reason, so it seems a bit pointless to have the PHEV and not plug it in. There used to be some advantage for business tax, but I think that may go away soon from what I've read. You also lose some boot space, because the batteries are under the boot floor. Otherwise it behaves like an ordinary hybrid. I have one, always plug it in, and do find it cheaper to run for short trips to the shops etc because I can do most of them on pure electric mode, although I didn't sign up for a special EV tariff, it wasn't worth it for my use pattern. For longer journeys the fuel consumption seems acceptable, but I have nothing equivalent to compare it with. I'd certainly expect it to be worse than a standard hybrid due to the extra weight, but whether it's better or worse than a pure petrol non-hybrid I couldn't say.

The issue isn't necessarily diameter, the overall wheel diameter will be unchanged since the lower profile of the tyres will offset the diameter increase. A bigger concern is the width of the tyre, to ensure that the chains don't foul suspension or brake components on full lock.

I had a 4WD Audi A5 (permanent 4x4, not haldex) and I loved that car! Even in good weather it always felt solidly planted, cornered like it was on rails. Sometimes moving off in a FWD car on a damp road, even without any silly behaviour, would set the front wheels spinning, but never with the Audi, and the front tyres lasted for much longer as well. On mountain roads in snow & ice it felt much more controllable. I now have a Superb iV, and although it has some nice features (and some crap ones, like MIB3) to be honest I wish I'd been able to keep the Audi (it was LHD, not ideal for the UK). Sorry for the heresy, guys... Next car I'll be looking for 4WD again.

Wait until you're reversing down a narrow country lane to reach a passing-place, and the car decides you're going to hit a leaf sticking out from the hedge & slams the brakes on with a screaming collision alert as well. Not a useful driver "aid" at all.

Do you remember this story: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-23930675 🙂

I frequently find that I can turn on the heater via the app at non-peak times of day, like 10am, but it almost never works at, say, 8am. It usually gives some banal error message much like the one above, blaming 'connection issues'. I've just assumed that the Skoda servers are overloaded/undersized for use at peak times, given the poor quality of the rest of the VW software it doesn't really surprise me.

I have a 2021 Superb iV. When at home I always charge it overnight, and get about 30 miles per charge. I can get more, maybe 35+, if I have a light right foot. I've recently come back from a touring holiday in France, where I did 3000 miles, mostly (maybe 80%) on autoroutes at 70-80MPH, the rest was slower local pottering at 30-40MPH. Over that time I had no way to charge the car, so that distance was done entirely on petrol, with the car usually set to "Sport" mode. I used 282litres, about 62 gallons, giving an average of around 48MPG for pure-petrol running, which I thought was pretty good for a heavy car driven mostly at speed and with no particular attention to driving 'economically'.

I'm sceptical that this could ever be made to work. I can see an uptick in fake MoTs, clocking, etc. Buy an instrument panel from a scrapped car, pop it in before the MoT, do a few 100 miles, then pop the "real" one back in for the rest of the year...

It's incredible because your home electricity has only 5% VAT, but petrol/diesel has 52.95p/litre fuel duty, and then 20% VAT on top. That brings in £30bn per year, and the government won't let that go easily...

Climbing hills is the easy bit, worst case is that you get stuck with spinning wheels. The big problem with winter on the front and summer on the back is when going downhill. You get to a curve, gently steer round, and if the front is grippier than the back you'll likely swap ends and possibly go over the edge. I spent 30 years living in the French Alps, always kept a full set of 4 wheels+tyres to fit in winter. The standard advice from the tyre suppliers was always winter tyres on all 4 wheels. In those regions where winter tyres are now mandatory from November to March (most French alpine departments) you legally require 4 winter tyres or, in an emergency, chains on the driving wheels.

Thanks for the suggestions, but I'm not convinced that it's related to traffic information, neither Google nor Skoda connect showed any delays on the routes in question. I can't remember if there's there an option to tell it to ignore traffic.

Can anyone explain the algorithm used by the MIB3 SatNav in a 2021 Superb? When I ask it for a route it often gives me something very illogical, sometimes using B roads instead of A roads, and clearly at odds with the fastest route suggested by Google Maps. I don't mean the way a satnav can sometimes suggest a minor road that cuts a corner to save 30 seconds, but a weird route that can be much slower. If I ignore it, and follow what I know to be the best route, it nags for a while trying to persuade me to change, but eventually gives up and recalculates for the route I'm on, and that invariably makes the arrival time much earlier (can be 15 minutes earlier on a 1 hour journey)! I've used other systems where it's possible to select between fastest/shortest/most economical, but I can't find any similar option for this. If I ask it for a selection of routes it will give me three, but even the fastest one is almost always slower than the one I know to be best. It's not due to traffic congestion (I've checked). These days I've taken to ignoring it and using Google, especially if I have someone in the car that can hold a phone & give me directions, which rather negates the point of having a built-in system. Any ideas?

I think that area marker shows the max all-electric range on the iV. You can turn it on/off in settings.

I've not seen that exact problem, but although I agree it's a great function on a cold day I find it rarely works first thing in the morning. It usually fails with a "couldn't connect" error, which leads me to suspect that Skoda's servers aren't able to keep up with the demand at peak times. A function which only works when you don't need it is pretty useless 😒

I haven't seen that with POIs, but I've seen other items on MIB3 systems where the default behaviour after a reset doesn't actually match the displayed defaults. Things that are shown as "off" are actually "on", and the way to reset them is to turn them on, save, then turn them off. That actually leaves the option off. You could try that with the POIs, turn them all on, save, then turn them all off and save again. MIB3 really is a steaming pile of 💩. I regret buying this car 😒 and miss my old Audi A5, can't wait to change it once I find a decent alternative.

I would agree, although not for reasons of cost. Since I keep my car in the garage overnight I have to set the max height so that the tailgate doesn't smash against the garage door when opening. Even with padding on the door it would still hit uncomfortably hard. Of course, this means that when opening it in car parks it doesn't fully open, I've lost track of how many times I've cracked my head on the locking 'tongue'. A manual hatch that I can open gently, and let it rest against the garage door padding (like all my previous cars), would be far more practical. It does seem like a totally unnecessary feature that's just there to make the car look more "high end". Sadly the shortage of cars when I bought it meant that I had no choice in terms of options, it was "take this one, or leave it".

Hi all, Has anyone found a way to reliably use playlists on a MIB3 system? I'm still having the same problems that have been reported several times over the past year: When playing from a playlist, if I switch off & leave the car, the next time I start it has not only lost the place in the playlist, it has completely forgotten I was using one. Instead it starts playing at the alphabetically first MP3 file on the USB stick. My guess is that it's timing-related, the media player tries to play the files before the system has mounted the drive, but I've tried many different USB drives, branded and no-name, and seen no difference in behaviour. I have a folder full of playlists. These work fine for a while, but after a period (days, weeks, it's not consistent) the system no longer reports any playlists as being found. When I navigate to that folder on the USB drive I can see all the playlist files, but they are greyed-out and unplayable. The only solution I've found is to put the USB drive into a PC, create a new folder (e.g. Playlists2), copy all the .m3u files to it, and then delete the originals. It works OK again for a while, then everything vanishes again. My best guess here is that there's some caching involved, and for some reason the system loses the internal link between the cache & the files, which is why recreating them (as apparently new files) works. I'm using a 128GB USB drive in the USB-A socket in the armrest box, but trying the USB-C socket by the ashtray didn't seem to change anything. Thanks Steve

Good suggestion, so I tried it. Since it's a UK-reg car it connected me to Skoda UK, and when I told the agent that I was on holiday in Ireland she said she'd transfer me to the European breakdown service. It rang, and then I was greeted with the inevitable set of options, "Press 1 for a new breakdown, 2 for an existing call, etc." All very well, except for one problem - when calling via the car's "spanner" option I could find no way to get a keyboard up to type digits 🙄 It wouldn't respond to voice commands, nor did waiting do anything than an endless repeat of the options. Eventually I gave up & just phoned the breakdown service from my mobile. They logged the call, opened a case, and told me to keep driving until I could get to a dealer & have the codes read. The Vehicle Health screen on the Skoda app claims that there are no faults, although given how unreliable the other features are I don't have much faith in its accuracy. The car's still under warranty, and Skoda have a log of my call, so I shall just do as they said and add the lack of phone keypad to my (ever-growing) list of bugs & issues with MIB3 to send to customer service. Yet another feature they haven't tested, it would seem.

Hi all, Anyone seen this, or have any advice? I have a UK-reg Nov '21 Superb iV, owned from new & still under warranty. I'm on holiday and was cruising on an Irish motorway with the system set in "Sport" mode when I got a beep, an engine management light, an orange icon and the message "hybrid drive system fault - visit workshop". The car continued to run OK with the ICE engine running. I pulled over to a parking area after a few km, and tried switching to pure EV mode. This was refused with an error about the system being inoperable. I then switched off, which produced a chorus of beeps, the hybrid error symbol in red and a "Stop" message. I waited a few minutes, restarted the car, and everything was fine. No error messages or lights, and everything has been working without any issues for the rest of the day. Obviously I can't visit a workshop on a Saturday or Sunday. Ideally I'd like to call in, have them read the diagnostic codes, and tell me whether this was just a transient glitch or a minor problem that can wait until I get home, but the nearest dealer is a 2-hour round trip and I really don't want to lose a day of our holiday if I can avoid it 😞 Has anyone had this happen, or had any thoughts about whether it's likely to let me down over the course of the week? Cheers Steve

Well, this is really weird, I've just noticed that it isn't changing now. I can "start" a route, and the display remains as before. I'll just have to chalk it up to another bizarre feature/bug.

Interesting indeed, I got mine in November 2021, the SW/HW version screen is:

Not quite, see the attached before & after pictures. I have been playing with various VC console layouts, but I really don't remember it doing this until recently. It's very irritating, looks like I'll just have to add it to the list of "infotainment" annoyances.

Hi, I have a 6-month old Superb iV. I have the Virtual Cockpit configured to a custom view, essentially the sport setup (central dial speed/revs) with audio & range configured for the side images. Recently (I'm pretty sure it only started a few weeks ago), whenever I select "start" for a route from the SatNav the VC display changes to show the navigation directions in the middle and I have to click twice on the "cycle through VC displays" button on the RHS of the steering wheel to get my chosen config back. I'm sure it didn't do this before. I've checked all the settings, and can't find anything I might have changed, accidentally or intentionally, which might cause this. Has anyone else seen this, or am I imagining that this didn't happen before? If anyone can point me to a setting I may have missed it would be much appreciated. Thanks, Steve.

In my experience French garages and accessory shops have no idea that there is even a difference. Ask for headlamp deflectors and the response is gallic bafflement. Once you explain the problem they may agree that it's a good idea, but "sorry M'sieur, never seen them". I generally had to order them via Amazon.