JFrankMiller

I found it in my infotainment screen > car settings. It's called "manoeuvre braking" or something similar and I turned it off.

Thank you! That’s really reassuring to know! It was such an awful, sudden, halt that I thought something had malfunctioned. I will have a look at my settings screen when I get back in the car. I’m working late and it’s still in the car park, but it will be the first thing I check in a few minutes.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. It’s welcome, as I like to imagine what the various doohickeys are up to during operation. It makes sense, yeah, to use the handbrake to do the stationary gripping which it was designed for. 👍

Well, you said you go into N first, then put it into P after N. You didn’t explicitly say that putting it straight into P was wrong but by saying you use N first you are implying that this is a better method than going straight to P, and I wondered if I was doing something wrong. Would I benefit from using the N then P method, or is it purely for self-satisfaction reasons?

Something weird occurred when I was pulling into work’s car park an hour ago. I’ve been driving my Fabia SE L about a month and it’s not happened before. Our car park at work is allowing wildflowers to grow, to help nature flourish, but they haven’t got round to trimming the car parking spaces yet. So the effect is that we’ve got lots of pretty wildflowers and they are also growing in the parking spaces. Anyway, I was reversing into a parking spot and my Fabia suddenly felt like it was crunching to a halt when I was maybe three-quarters of the way back into my space. The best way I can describe it is if you were reversing at about 5mph and a child in the passenger seat suddenly pulled the handbrake on. I’ve got reverse parking sensors in my SE L but it doesn’t have a camera, so I think it’s the standard reversing pack. I think that the reverse beep made a solid beep at the same time, but I can’t be sure because my main thought at the time was that I’d reversed over a pretty large breezeblock or something and my senses were more focused on getting out and having a look. I got out and had a look and there was nothing underneath my car. My heart slowed down a bit. I had a look round the sides and back. Nothing obvious. My heart went back to normal. No external damage to my month-old Fabia, thank christ. The only thing I could see was what I would describe as a “sprig” of wildflowers, maybe about 20 inches high, which was slap bang at the rear of my car and lightly brushing the rear bumper. Sprouting straight out of the ground. Imagine if your mum had put a boquet of flowers in a vase and set it down into a car parking space. That sort of size. Just a sprig of wildflowers growing out of the ground, about the size of a bunch of daffodils. So, had I triggered some kind of emergency stop system when I reversed into this meaningless obstacle? I kind of hope I did, because if that’s what it was then there’s nothing mechanically wrong with my car and it simply overreacted to a sensor input. Anyone else had their reverse park system suddenly decide it was gonna stop the car? I should add that work is fairly quiet today. It’s a typical Monday and there were no other cars near the spot I picked. The car park is only about a third full.

What’s wrong with just driving into the parking spot, holding the brake pedal fully down once you’re at a standstill, putting gearstick into P, apply handbrake, then foot off the brake?

Yeah. Agreed. Max torque probably only occurs for a brief moment, at a certain point in the rev range.

Ah, right. Fair enough. I just checked on Parkers and noticed that the 1.5 was the same as maximum gearbox torque and I expected it to be able to handle a bit more than is available. A bit like how bridges are normally rated to carry more weight than whatever is stated. That's all. Equal is fine.

I take it that the maximum torque rating of 250Nm on the DQ200 isn't the same as engine torque output? Because the 1.5 L 150PS variant would be pushing the allowed torque. Is it a different thing for engine output torque rating versus torque on the gearbox output?

That's great to know. I was going to go hunting around on the forum for servicing schedules etc., but I don't need to now. 🙂 It's handy to know for general knowledge about the car, too. My car was low mileage when I picked it up (7.5k) , so it would have been a concern if you hadn't enlightened me. Cheers.

Does my Fabia 2022 plate have a DQ200 DSG? Is this the newer type?

Yeah. I hear you @Ootohere. I've been using the handbrake when stopped at lights on a steep hill that I regularly go up. I'm gonna try out the Hill Hold Control feature when I'm on a hill and it's clear enough behind, just to see how effective it is. After that, I will be applying discretion in using the handbrake as well, if it's a particularly difficult slope.

Thanks for that @DerekU So... the rule of thumb for using the handbrake on my Fabia 110PS DSG is that I should only use the handbrake when parking up, right? Or in a motorway queue when it's likely that I will be stationary for a few minutes, betweek putting the gearbox into Park and taking my foot off the brake pedal?

Thanks for that thread. I just looked through it and this bit from @Phil-E caught my attention: So I guess that answers my question. Sorry if my original post (and one or two replies!) sounded flippant. I was genuinely curious as to whether you could damage the clutch by leaving it on the bite-point. I've only been driving my Fabia for 3 weeks and whenever I've been sitting with my foot (firmly) on the brake at traffic lights I thought it was being held on the bite-point. But if Phil's quote is true, it actually holds off the bite-point until you start releasing your foot off the brake. That doesn't excuse my rather naive question about leaving the handbrake on and having your foot off the brake, of course. In that situation it probably would, indeed, wear down the clutch. I tried testing the Hill Hold Control feature this morning, but it wasn't a very steep incline that I was sat on. It seemed to work, but I shall have to find a steeper hill, to confirm 😃 That's interesting info about there being two different systems for holding the car on a hill, @logiclee. Thanks. I'm very happy with the way my car drives. I just have to ask these possibly daft questions until I get a fuller knowledge of how it's working.

Ah. Nice. I will try this feature out.

Because I'm asking a hypothetical question to see if there's a safety system which prevents you from burning out the clutch on the DSG gearbox. I'm not actually interested in sitting listening to music for two hours while my clutch grinds down to bare metal.

What if you're sitting halfway up a steep hill? Wouldn't you release it momentarily and wait for it to start trying to pull away before releasing the handbrake?

I'm new to this DSG malarkey, but I like it. My question is quite simple. If I were to drive my Fabia to a car park, come to a halt, then pull on the handbrake, and take my foot off the brake, and sit there listening to the stereo for a couple of hours, would the clutch eventually become ruined due to sitting on the bite-point for two hours? I'm quite mechanically sympathetic and I like to know such things.

That sounds like a reasonable point. I guess a tracker is best placed on a very desirable car for theft, like an M5 or a top-end Skyline or something. I hadn't really thought it through and just assumed that because it could be located in an app then it was tracked by a tracker. Thinking about it from an insurers perspective it's far more likely they mean a one that's connected to some police system, yeah.

Nice. I haven't tried using the app to monitor my progress as a belt down a road yet. 🤣 Seriously, though. Interesting point as to whether the in-build Skoda system does live position data. I think I'm gonna have to take it into a dealer in the next couple of weeks to make them perform a system update on the infotainment system, cos I've got one stuck and pending for over a week. I work in software and I know what I'm doing, to some extent, with technology, so it's more likely a poor update mechanism rather than user error. I'm hoping that if they get it on a current software version the updates will flow merrily from that point onward. I will ask about live tracking when I'm at the dealer.

Aye. Thanks @Ootohere. Very good point, as the underwriter/insurer is going to vary a bit depending on their particular overall policy. I paid a few quid extra to switch my current policy over to the new car. So it needs a proper renewal in 4 months. I'm technically currently on my old policy just with a new car at the moment. So, what I think I will do in the meantime, is to let the month free trial of the subscription expire in a couple of weeks, then see if the app still lets me do basic things like locate the car. I don't think it does but I might have misremembered because the tech was new to me at the time. Once I confirm if it does/doesn't require an ongoing subscription to locate the car, I will have more accurate information to give the insurer when it comes to renewal time. Cheers.

When I quickly switched my insurance over from my old Kia to the Fabia I bought, a couple of weeks ago, there were three boxes to tick relating to alarm, immobiliser and tracker. I ticked the first two, to say that my new vehicle has alarm and immobiliser but I left the third one unchecked since I wasn't sure about tracker. I'm currently using the month's free trial of the "Care Connect - Remote Access" subscription and, while I don't find myself using the features that often, I'm tempted to pay £38 for a year when it expires. I'm sitting in the park on my phone and I can quite accurately locate where my Fabia is parked, a couple of miles away. Does this count as a tracker on the insurance? Is it only a tracker while I'm paying for a subscription? I don't think that the app allows you to locate your car until you're subbed, if I remember correctly.

Haha. I work in a similar field. My work involves python programming and maintaining web services. I agree that there's much room for improvement in the way that current Skoda's attempt to integrate into the driver's digital life! Yesterday I decided to factory reset the head unit so that it might have a better chance of completing the OCU update it told me was finished downloading about a day earlier. I tried to login using my Skoda Connect email and password and it just wouldn't do anything. No error message. Nothing apart from the email/password boxes emptying themselves when I tapped login. After four or five goes I decided to look at the MySkoda app on my phone and noticed that I'd been logged out of the app. It definitely hadn't done that before over the last three days and I'm three days into the one month free trial of the MySkoda remote service. So I logged myself back into the app and then tried logging in via the dashboard again and this time it worked. There was no message that I'd been locked out until I logged into the app. It was down to chance/guesswork that I discovered how to login again. I'm trying not to let it taint the experience of what is a brilliant car to own and use, but it's quite clunky and frustrating at times.

I tried a factory reset and restart login as primary user tonight, in order to try and complete the OCU update (whatever OCU is). It's still doing nothing and I'm certain it had a downloaded update from two days ago which it hadn't applied yet. Kind of annoying on such and otherwise lovely car.

I've found an example pic on a random webpage of how Waze displays a roundabout. See the swirl with the number "1" inside it? I reckon it's the swirl which is not being interpreted by the Skoda dash correctly. They obviously didn't program the Skoda software to recognise a 3rd party symbol. Maybe a system update will help me. I know I've got one pending.