psycholist

Well he certainly knows a skookum choocher when he sees one :).

If the rear calipers have to come off to remove this guard it's a proper pain without a car lift. I did this the summer before last replacing the disks and it took ages to break loose one of the caliper bolts. I could have had it removed almost effortlessly with a long breaker bar but the ground was in the way, so I was limited to what would fit in the wheel arch. SuperbTWM - you wouldn't happen to be an AvE fan on youtube? That's the first place I've heard the term 'home gamer' used, but it's so perfect I use it myself all the time now.

If the car drove as you expected it to, cost what you expected in motor tax and fuel and had no reliability issues as a result of the emissions cheat then the car hasn't really wronged you any more than it has wronged everyone in the country you drive in including you as a result of the extra pollution emitted. I suspect the law firm will be the only party to profit from this, but I would like to see each country where cars were sold chase VW (And any other cheating manufacturers) for compensation for the environmental damage the extra NOx emissions caused. Similarly other car companies might have grounds to sue VW over lost earnings due to people buying VAG cars when they would have bought elsewhere if the emissions of the car were reported honestly (Since the VW cars wouldn't have been approved for sale). I suspect this won't ever happen as any claim like this would lead to other companies' cheating methods being discussed in court, so much better for them to say nothing. The figure I've heard for deaths from air pollution in Ireland is about 1300 a year, but what percentage of this is due to NOx, not to mind extra NOx from cheating VAG cars has not been calculated. I suspect it's very small since the regulations allow everyone to emit way more NOx than the tests limits when air temperatures are low.

Driving a car hard won't usually glaze the brakes. Lots of gentle braking usually does this as the brakes get hot enough to glaze the pads but there's not enough braking load applied to break the glazed material off. A few hard brakes from 70 mph to about 30 on an empty motorway massively improved the brake bite for me when I bought my car.

I've noticed my car doing an active regen once in normal use since I bought it almost 3 years ago and that was a one-off drive in the 3 hour traffic jam, which qualifies as normal driving for anyone trying to get out of Dublin on a Friday afternoon. The only other time was when an exhaust pressure sensor failed in such a way that it gave incorrect but plausible readings, making the car think the DPF was blocked. My driving is more or less ideal for excellent life from a DPF though. It gets very few trips (None at all this summer come to think of it) that aren't long enough to get everything to temperature and keep it there while driving on 80+ km/h roads.

I've never heard of it working on Superb II models, which you have based on your signature, but it's supposed to work on the Superb III.

As far as I know the diff is a standard open differential and it is made behave as it it is a torsen/limited slip by the ABS system braking the spinning wheel. This is more wasteful than a proper limit slip diff, but all the hardware is already in the ABS module, so it's a lot cheaper. This system is also used as torque vectoring, where the brake on the inside wheel is dragged slightly on bends to make the car pull into the bend better - I turned this on on my Superb II a while ago and it does make a subtle improvement when it's pushed into bends. Traction control still cuts power from the engine if both wheels are spinning though it's not as sudden and complete in cutting power as the previous systems. Haldex 4x4 systems connect drive to the rear wheels to see if there's grip there before cutting power from the engine when the front wheels spin.

The accelerator lag is a 'feature'. It can be reduced by telling the engine management the engine is in an Audi using VCDS or by installing an after market pedal tuning box, which sits between the pedal position sensor and the ECU and makes the engine think the pedal is pressed more than it is. On a friend's Leon Cupra it made a noticeable difference, even when it was already in sport mode.

If it's on the original battery then you're probably doing pretty well anyway. The Superb works the battery hard as the battery is small for the size of the car and the amount of electronics on board. Another thread recommended this battery as a replacement: http://www.justcarbatteries.co.uk/varta-silver-dynamic-096-battery-e44.html If there's been no slow cranking previous times and this is out of the blue it might be worth checking whether something is drawing current when the car is off.

Love the blue and beige combination (I may be slightly biased since my Superb II has this combination). Those alloys look great too. Enjoy it :).

You'll have to pull the seats apart to fit the heating mats into them to make this upgrade as well as changing the panel at the back of the center console to add the buttons for the seats. My car has them, but only because Irish spec elegance models had them by default. Have a look under the rear seat cushion for wires that aren't connected to anything as a very quick check whether your car has been prewired for heated rear seats. I'd be quite surprised if it was.

The issue the OP and a few others are running in to appears to be that the wheel size for the superb II is being mistakenly used for the Superb III by some people, hence the range of rolling diameters. The Octavia II and Superb II both took the same wheel size, but the Superb III has added 5 to the profile on the tyre to give a bigger overall diameter and more rubber between the alloy and the road. A lot of people, myself included, assumed the Superb III had the same wheel size as the Superb II initially.

I wonder what the 'Without bracket' entry on the spec list is for. Has anyone got a car with a bracket?

I had a dragging rear caliper on a previous car and the heat was noticeable as I walked past the car after parking if it was just off a motorway run.

That's about 10 minutes (Cycling) from my house ... Easy to forget there's more than one dealership built with the same corrugated metal walls that does Skoda and Mercedes. At least you have Christmas and new years to distract you for the next 2 and a bit weeks. Enjoy the new car!

I've got a second letter from Skoda Ireland asking me to bring the car in, which I will also ignore. The benefit of getting the 170 engine is that a remap will get this engine over 200 bhp . On my front wheel drive car it can be a job to get it to the road in the wet below 4th gear though, especially with winter tyres on. Suffice it to say I'm happy to live with this problem rather than the possibility of my engine running like crap and the certainty of it losing 30 bhp after the dealer has messed with it.

Is that the dealership in Naas? I bought my car second hand from them almost 3 years ago. It was the first dealership for any brand I went to where the salesman was genuinely knowledgeable about what he was selling.

The figures for deaths due to pollution would be much much higher if everyone was driving 30 year old cars though. The problem really is that while regulations place tighter and tighter constraints on emissions, the car manufacturers are passing on all the extra expense of the systems to meet these regulations to the consumer, with customers having very little comeback on issues, especially outside the warranty period. This means that the cost of ownership for a modern car, while theoretically low to entice people to buy new cars (Looking at fuel economy, cheap servicing and longer service intervals, as well as reduced tax and insurance), often ends up being much higher for anyone who's not in warranty and even some who are. The potential of a car to be a complete money pit, combined with driverless cars that can be called on demand (Pretty much what Uber and Lyft are working on now), means that in 10 years time it looks like very few people will buy cars. The number of people buying cars (In western Europe and the US) is already declining I think. In Ireland it's so expensive to get insured on anything even when into your 20s that many people have already given up on owning cars here.

With a remap you may be able to match the power to weight ratio of 240 bhp 3 litre A6 with the 2 litre Superb. It'll never sounds as good though. Of course if you're remapping the 3 litre and have Quattro rather than Haldex 4WD there's no comparison .

My Superb II combi came in at 1645 kg IIRC with about a half tank of fuel, 16" full size spare wheel and tools, OEM towbar and panoramic roof according to its NCT certificate. I didn't empty everything else out of the car either, so there's at least another 10 kg between jump leads (So far they've only been used to start other people's cars - they even got me a free swim last christmas after helping a guy who was stranded at reception because he'd left his lights on ), random maps, bike tools and a full glove compartment. I'm surprised there's so little difference as I thought the Superb III was supposed to be a good bit lighter than the Mark II. Maybe they only started really stripping the car down to ace the economy tests with the Mark III, but I doubt it. I'd keep my divers elsewhere - they're divils for clogging the fuel filter if you leave them in the tank :P...

I installed a split charge relay behind the boot lining in my Superb II in order to make the 12 V socket in the boot into an ignition switched socket so I can run a fridge and inverter from this while driving without needing to remember to shut everything off when I stop. Putting a battery into the side compartment in the boot with a split charge circuit and running power from this to the 12 V socket in the boot wall would give you a power source that doesn't depend on the main battery without taking up any obvious room in the car and without having to run new wires since you can just use the 180 W supply (It's got a 15 A fuse on the Superb II anyway) to the boot socket already. You will have to do some careful measuring to make sure the battery you choose will fit in the side compartment though as I suspect it will be a bit tight. The other thing I'm not sure about is whether the smart charging system will have problems with a dual battery setup. If you change to a battery with a different capacity to the OEM one you are supposed to tell the ECU the new battery capacity as the car stops charging to save fuel once it reckons the battery is full. It may not have a setting to deal with doubling the battery capacity.

Everything should turn back on once you unplug the lights, it certainly does in my Superb II, though I don't have blind spot monitoring. The blind spot monitor, at least theoretically, shouldn't need to be disabled because you have a trailer. Check whether you can turn it back on in the setup menus just in case it was turned off at some point previously and you only spotted it after trying the trailer plug. The rear sensors not coming back on is definitely not right though.

One of the clever features hidden in the cup holder is a set of bumps in the bottom of the centre cup holder (That intersects the other 2) to hold the bottom of a 500 ml bottle so you can unscrew the lid one handed. I've not seen this feature on any other car.

Check the carpets and spare tyre well in the boot for water. Slow demisting usually indicates something is wet inside the car. Hopefully it's just because the car was standing around with humid autumn air in it, which condensed into the car when it got cold a few weeks ago it and is drying out as you use it, but there may be a leak somewhere. The passenger footwell, panoramic roof drains and spare tyre well are the common places for leaks (for the small number of people that have issues). EU law says every car sold there has to have a km/h speed readout, but if plug into the OBD port with VCDS and tell it it's now an Australian car you can get mph instead. A ratcheting noise while turning is usually CV joints. The power steering is electric, so the only noise I've noticed from it is a high pitched electrical whine when it's working hard and I have the window open. If it's happening when you turn the wheel but are not rolling then it's a lot less likely to be CV joints. Those tyre pressures seem a little off what my car recommends, on mine the recommended pressure pretty much equal all around unless the car is loaded where the rear wheels get more than the front - have a look on the table printed inside the fuel filler flap for the recommended pressures. Tyre pressure monitoring uses the ABS sensors to detect slight variations in average speed between tyres. if one is going flat it will spin slightly faster than the other correctly inflated tyres. It won't detect sudden punctures, but has saved me from replacing 2 tyres so far by spotting slow punctures. I can't help on bluetooth, mine just worked when I connected but it never gave any RSAP options as I don't think my phone supports it at all. I'm not sure my car supports the useful RSAP features like displaying text messages on the Columbus screen anyway.

It's possible the figure the car is giving you is changing because you're driving the car in a way that allows it to cut most of it's NOx emissions through EGR without making much use of SCR. Not using full power on the engine very often and less stop/start driving should give the SCR system a quiet life. I'm also admiring the Jimni in your avatar . What do you think of the Jimni for the odd daily drive with off roading on the weekends? After test driving one a friend had a couple of months ago I've been thinking of getting one to go playing on the mountain trails around here... Anything to watch for/walk away from on second hand in 1.3 litre petrol models from early to mid 2000s? Any essential upgrades for offroading? I would have sent you a message, but messaging seems to be disabled on your account.