PetrolDave

I'm not 100% sure that a UK badge on the number plates would be acceptable, since we are no longer a member of the EU the EU approved number plates with country letters no longer apply to us. My understanding is that we need separate UK badges, like we used to have before the number plates with country letters.

It's certainly the recommendation made by Skoda UK that the cambelt be changed after 5 years or 50K miles (whichever comes sooner) - surely that the recommendation comes from Skoda UK that makes it more than "unofficial"?

GM in the US have announced that they will halt production at nearly all their American factories due to the chip shortage General Motors will idle the plants starting Monday for two weeks due to COVID-19 affecting the production of semiconductor chips

+1 My Octavia Mark 3 Elegance with halogen headlights had headlight washers.

I did this tweak on my Mark 3 Octavia, it meant I could choose when/if the headlight washers came on by how long I help the windscreen washers on - seems the best compromise to me?

Whenever I've ordered a new car in the past 30 years the purchase contract has always said that the price and VAT rate will be those on the date of delivery not the date of ordering, although I had a good enough relationship with one dealer that they stood by the price at the time of ordering as a gesture of goodwill despite what the contract said.

The seam sealant is applied in the factory before the shell is painted.

Use standard VW type removals keys, available from any good car parts retailer (e.g. Halfords in the UK).

Skoda stopped fitting the PR code label in the boot several years ago.

In 2016 I changed from an RS4 Avant to an Octavia 3 estate (retirement meant I needed smaller bills). The big plus points of the Octavia for me are the greater rear legroom (due to the longer wheelbase) and the larger "boot" space (due to the more vertical rear hatch). If you're not worried about badge snobs I would go for the Octavia.

It's not uncommon for the radio to start up is a "strange mood" - it happened several times on my Octavia 3, always came back to normal after the ignition was off for more than a few minutes.

That depends on whether mappy is CarPlay compatible - you'll need to ask the developers of Mappy. BTW I use Google maps and find them great, they have one big advantage which is that you can download offline maps while on WiFi which means the only mobile data usage is for traffic information.

My understanding is that the sat nav SD card cannot have anything except the sat nav data and that the music files need to be on a separate SD card.

MIB1 (until mid 2016) or MIB2? Often a larger SD card isn't needed if the card is reformatted to FAT32 with the Cluster size set to 4K (there are many very small files which can waste a huge amount of space (even a 1 byte file takes the cluster size).

I heard that too, which means GB on number plates is not valid when driving in Europe and additional UK plates are required (either magnetic or adhesive on the body, or - not sure if the EU will accept a stick on UK over the GB on the number plates?).

It could very well need a FEC (Feature Enable Code).

If the services were done at an independent not a Skoda dealer they almost certainly won't appear in the Skoda service history, ask to see the paperwork with the car.

Check the socket in the boot too as they share the same fuse.

The lights won't go out by themselves, they need to be reset with a diagnostic tool.

It was really terrible on a Jaguar XJ6 we tested - so bad it actually hurt our ears!

It's because there is a high pressure area alongside the car so when you open the windows at speed that high pressure tries to 'escape' inside the car but can't do it continuously, hence the pulsing. Cars have been doing it ever since drag factor became an issue - was seen on every car we worked on when I was working on active noise systems back in the late 1980's so it's not a new thing nor a specific to Skoda thing.

77kWh in doesn't mean 77kWh added to the batteries as battery charging efficiency isn't 100%, more like 70% = so the batteries will have more like 54kWh added charge making more like 210 miles.

Depends on the part, in most cases the suffix letter is different between low -, mid- and high-line.

... because that screen shows only the software version of the infotainment system, not he software versions of ANY of the other (and there are a lot) of modules in the car. IMHO trying to keep track of software updates to other modules by looking at the infotainment system version is pointless and misleading.

Nearly all HDD, SSD and SD card manufacturers use 1000 as the multiplier, but most OSs use 1024 which is why there is such a large difference between the size of storage device yu buy and the reported capacity when installed and formatted (the format data is much less than the apparent 'lost' capacity).