Rory

My experience was some years ago but DtD were rude - they called me but wouldn't take the discussion any further unless I agreed to order based on the factory lead time, and we needed the car quickly as the other car needed to go to a family member whose car had reached end-of-life. CarWow worked brilliantly - apparently the dealers know where you are and it was noticeable that the dealers furthest away quoted lower. I got the best offer from a dealer in S Wales, but that's a long and messy journey. Our next nearest but one VW dealer (14 miles away) wasn't far out, so went to see them and there was some further movement on price so in the end they were pretty close on cost. Still a few hundred more than DtD's price though. What's daft is they have to pay something in the region of £400 to CarWow, yet I'd walked out of a sister branch on the one we bought from as they'd refused to negotiate.

When we got our Karoq last Aug we really wanted a new one but there were just none around - yet Skoda had a summer offer of £2500 deposit contribution even though lead-time was 9mths. Kamiq had £3500 on it, and leadtime on that was even longer. Dealer told us Skoda had got in a bit of a panic as the number of people renewing PCPs had dropped right off. Maybe the same is happening now? Back in Aug the dealer put an order on for us to have a new one, so we could grab the PCP contribution. It was always going to be a lot to change, but they indicated around £6K. The car turned up in Dec (so very early) and the dealer was talking about £13K to change, so I cancelled it. A thing dealers do with PCP customers is try to get them into a new car before their current PCP expires - the salesman told me that's become very difficult as px values have dropped so much that there's no equity in the customers current vehicles. Don't know if it still works, but do people use CarWow or DriveTheDeal these days? We got a great price on our last Tiguan using CarWow, and the car came from a nearby dealer who got us the exact spec and colour we wanted from pipeline stock - it arrived 8 days after we ordered it, although they had said it could be 4-6 weeks. We also have access to Affinity through the Blue Light scheme and Griifin through Boundless (ex-CSMA). Griffen had very low pricing on Karoq last year but you had to wait full leadtime and pick the car up from Aldershot - I've bought ars from a distance before and it's never been straightforward and Aldershot is a long way for us.

Both our daughters have the 1 litre 3 cyl 110PS engines in their cars. One is a 2018 Ateca - I've driven it a bit and "adequate" is the word I'd use too. I mean, it is what is, if you know what I mean - you're not going to be doing fast A road overtakes in it, and it's so highly geared in 6th that a slope on the motorway can require dropping down a gear, but it drives perfectly well in everyday use. She does 20K miles a year in hers and has done many long trips with her family. Other daughter has 2023 Kamiq, but I haven't driven that. She's away this weekend with her family on a cross-country trip and the car will be fully loaded. Both cars are manual - we'd have had auto for the Kamiq but daughter wasn't bothered either way and we needed the car quickly and autos were less available. I'm probably being somewhat old-fashioned, but for my own purposes I don't think I'd be happy with the 1 litre. The 1.5 in wife's Karoq DSG OK, but I'm more used to the grunt of higher torque diesel autos. Having said that, I could live with the 1 litre if I had to.

Drifting somewhat from the original question, but the diesels (EA288) use belt in oil to drive the oil pump.

No - specifically if you Withdraw from the finance you are still required to pay for the car. Withdrawal is a specific term in the CCA: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/39/section/66A No - Settling (the Act calls it" Right to complete payments ahead of time" requires 28 days notice to be given. So you simply can't "Settle" in 14 days - well, in theory you could, but you get charged for the 28 days anyway, plus 30 days interest early settlement penalty. I've done this multiple times for myself and family members and I'm completely confident I understand how it works, so I'll leave it there.

I'm sorry, but that's mostly the same as I wrote, except that you're wrong about Settling. If people Settled with 14 days they'd have hundreds of pounds of interest to pay, not the few pounds usually charged on Withdrawing.

Well, to be a bit more pedantic - it's really nothing to do with VWFS, it's the law, largely the Consumer Credit Act 1974. This allows you to Withdraw completely within 14 days, and like I said earlier, it's supposed to be like the finance never existed. Because of this, the situation with incentives is a bit of a grey area, some manufacturer finance arms have it in their T's & C's that they can be taken away, but in practice I've seen in discussed in forums populated by car sales people and they say it never happens, and we know VWFS doesn't do it (and they surely would if they could). After 14 days you're Settling. You have to give 28 days notice to the finance company and they are entitled (and always do) charge another 30 days interest as a penalty. On a typical new car deal this is going to cost a few hundred pounds in interest. However the situation with incentives is clearer cut - they can't be withdrawn.

Did it on a Kamiq a couple of months ago. The VWFS lady even waived the interest charge - it's the third time I've done it, and that's never happened before. I've always been slightly puzzled by the interest charge, because Withdrawing is supposed to be like there was never any finance in place, so I don't know on what basis they can charge interest. However when it was waived, it made me slighly nervous that, if the finance had really never existed, they could try to reclaim the deposit contribution. In practice that hasn't happened.

Based on the kind of pricing the OP is seeing for a service, then it seems Skoda (VW Group) may be trying to do the same thing as Mercedes did, where they made "rack rate" servicing so ridiculously expensive that the Mercedes ServiceCare plan seemed quite reasonable - and that didn't include MOT or warranty (although MB dealer servicing extends the Roadside cover anyway). I suppose if you are going to carry on using a dealer for servicing then All In makes sense although £900 is less easier to accept than when it was ~£600. It seems on these types of forums that many people do still use their local dealer for servicing, yet I was talking to a service manager of another (non-VW Group) brand and he reckoned hardly anyone with a car outide factory warranty uses a franchise dealer for service.

Is it 10% out even at 70? We use Waze for navigation - I don't want to put misleading numbers up, but it reads close enough to car's digital display that it hasn't given me enough concern to especially note the difference.

Are they brand-new or pre-reg - does the dealer have a web link to them? I got very annoyed last year as wanted a new Karoq but needed it quickly. There just seemed to be nothing around. Dealers were advertising cars, but when you'd rang there'd be all sorts fo bull about why they didn't actually have them. However there were loads on nearly-new cars around. VW was same with Tiguan. It just seemed to me like they'd pre-reg'd the cars to avoid having to give the PCP deposit contribution and new-car discount. We took a nearly new one and the dealer put an order in place for a new one. It came last month (3 months early) but the dealer offered an absurdly low price for ours so told him to stuff it. He said it's become very difficult to do deals at the moment as "book" price on used cars had dropped dramatically. Yet forecourt resales seem as high as ever. They were talking £18K for ours yet have the same car on the forecourt at £25,500.

Well, I suppose the average Skoda owner may be a little different, but apparently pretty well everyone "buys" new cars on PCP now. So with the deposit contribuion does make the starting price £3250 lower. And the interest rate is pretty good these days (although they are starting to drift down with othe rmakes too). Of course you might be able to get the car even cheaper - when we got our Tiguan new, as well as £2750 deposit contribution, the dealer knocked more than £30000 off, so that £30K list car cost us £24K. I did withdraw from the finance, but if we'd have let it run we would have been financing £24K rather than £30K. On your other point, does the Polish price inc VAT?

That's not far off Skoda's own price for 2yrs of Service Plus! You might as well buy that. https://customer.vwfs.co.uk/service-plans/skoda?traci_c=UK|OSP|S|Sales|Core|Skoda:DM-P:&traci_s=SI:SKODA:SEA:Google:SearchAd:2023-01:&traci_ee=19604534807:145589334923:647819819924::::&traci_t=skoda all in:e::&s_kwcid=AL!10901!3!647819819924!e!!g!!skoda all in&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIx-Cw5dGZhAMVuYtQBh3JTw8pEAAYASAAEgLYUfD_BwE Or, as mentioned earlier, All In, which, for a bit more, gives you warranty, roadside and MOT too. (I'd make sure the spark plugs etc are covered in the All In plan - it's not expliity stated, I don't think). Or abandon Skoda altogether and use an indie - should be way cheaper. There's a school of thought that taking a car to a dealer once it's a few years old is asking for trouble as they try and load on things like pads & discs, new tyres as your are down to 4.5mm etc.

We're new to Skoda but have had VWs and SEATs for years. The servcing has always done my head in - especially the way it used to alternate between minor and major services, but they only did the major servcing stuff if it needed to done based on time & distance but charged for it anyway. So you'd be paying for spark plugs (or diesel fuel filter) and air filter, including the cost of doing that work, and they wouldn't be changed. I thnk what they've done now is taken those items out (but not reduced the price) and now they get added back in (at additional cost) if required. So now you're paying the price of a major service and all you're getting is an oil and filter change and some checks (which are usually covered by the dealer vehicle check anyway). Not having to deal with this crap is almost making me look forward to having an EV!

That does seem high - wonder if they've included a/c service, which some dealers will say is "mandatory every 2yrs". Including the cost of that (maybe £179?) and the quote is about right. Did you ask the dealer how they arrived at that price? Mind you, I didn't know All In was £37.50/mth now - thought it was £30. All In doesn't inclue the a/c service (becuase it doesn't really need doing).

Supposedly it's a condition of the 2 services deal that the car is put on fixed interval servicing. Having said that, ours was left on variable servicing and if I look at the plan on the Skoda Finance site, it says it expires 2027 - so it appears they do allow for the possibility that it may be 4yrs for the two services to be done. I noticed the All In plans on our old VW and daughter's SEAT say the same thing.

Fatalistic, above, pointed out that their's is the same. So seems likely it's doing this by design - I'm guessing that Skoda (VW Group, probably) assume that you'll only look at the trip mileage now and again and once you've looked you may well want to reset it, so they helpfully tell you how.

I think it's telling you how to do it, rather than asking you to,

What tyre pressures are you running? I was a bit amazed to find the recommended pressure for the 215/10/18 tyres on Karoq is only 2.1bar (30.5 psi). I thought that was too low and there's a thread on here saying the same. I put them up to 35psi. Wheelspin, with Michelin Primacy 3 tyres, became a nightmare. Put them back down to around 30psi and it's much better. It still doesn't take very much to provoke wheel spin but I can usually get going without it. Was out early this morning at -6C driving the lanes between villages, used quite a few junctions with sharp turns, and had no issues. The other thing which I've changed, although I'm not sure either way if this was an issue, is I've switched back to using standard unleaded. The super stuff, even from Costco, seemed to make the start sharper. With lower pressure I am concerned it might make the wheels more susceptible to pothole damage.

Bearing in mind the older type, R134a, has been banned for use in new model releases since 2011, I think it's pretty unlikely Karoq uses it. The prices you quoted seem about right for the newer, R-1234yf, gas. The indie we use will do a recharge with the old stuff for £45. I had a our old (late mk1) Tiguan done at a VW dealer for £79 a couple of years ago. They were around £150 for the newer gas.

I guess it's an unanswerable question whether the dealer would eventually find the deal unsupportable, but you might have been lucky your new car didn't slip out much further - as it was, I guess it came in earlier than expected? Having said that, and I realise WBAC is just a reference point, but they've been noteably giving very low offers for some months now. It's very much a worst case price from them - people are getting significantly higher prices from places like Motorway, and retail prices on forecourts are still pretty high.

The 2019 Tiguan was a 1.5TSi DSG Match, I think the only options were metallic and power boot (although they would have added a grand to the list price). Don't know what list would have been, but there was the DtD discount and a hefty deposit contribution at the time. In 4 yrs it'd only done 12K miles, and people do seem keen on low mileage in the UK so that would have helped the value it sold for. I bought the late 2015 (so last of the mk1's) Tiguan we had through CarWow for £24K and that would have listed at £30K with its options inc DSG & 4Motion. DtD were cheaper, but wouldn't tell me who the dealer was and wanted me to wait factory lead-time. As it was, we got the car in 8 days.

In looking to change our car, I considered a neighbours 2019 Tiguan 1.5TSi DSG that he'd paid £23,500 for by buying it through DrivetheDeal - he sold it to a trader for £22,500 in Aug 23. He'd ordered a new Tiguan in mid-2021 for £30K and that was only delivered a few mths ago, but they held the price. List on delivery was nudging £40K - he was nervous it would go over as it would bump up the VED.

Dealers are making a lot of money at the moment from people who are forced, or are daft enough, to change their car. I commented in another recent thread about "cancelling" our new Karoq order - what happened was we changed wife's old Diesel Tiguan for a nearly-new Karoq in the summer, paying, what I knew to be, a high price. At the same the dealer put an order for a new one so as to grab the hefty PCP incentive that was available back then. Lead-time was 9mths. Cost to change was estimated at £6K. They called just before Xmas as car was on its way (so months early) and cost to change is now £13K. 😕 (and that includes a couple of £K PCP contribution). They indicated £18K for our Karoq - yet have a higher mileage, but othewrise identical, Karoq on the forecourt at £25,495 and Autotrader indicates that's a "fair" price. And you mention EVs - Skoda dealers are lucky that they don't have to contend with many EVs, they only have Enyaq. I've been told loads are being shifted on Motability, (although I can't say I'm seeing many around) but if it's true then the market will be swamped with them in 3yrs time - big risk if buying with your own money.

Welcome! We've had quite a few discussions about tyres for the Karoq here - even the 18's on ours are more than I'd like, our Tiguan we had before was on 17" wheels, which seemed perfect, and we drove it half the year on 16" winter tyres, which felt like driving on balloons!