Rory

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 However the situation with incentives is clearer cut - they can't be withdrawn.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!

Perhaps we're at cross-purposes a little - I'm wondering if (for a given size) they'll make one tyre, but mark it with the various speed and load ratings so it satisfies the demand for those. Some tyre sizes, such as the last one in your list, 215/40R17, are only available in XL with a load index of 87 . Some online sellers don't note all the tyres they list in that size as XL, even though they are.

I wonder if, in practice, XL and non-XL are any different these days? I recall seeing 4 ply and 6 ply belts years ago but haven't seen any reference to that for years. I read somewhere that Michelin, for example, use the same carcass across many tyres and XL tyres aren't re-inforced as such. In others words the diferent rating are more marketing than anything else. Tyre companies surely can't make multiple speed and load rates tyres in each size? Be interesting to compare the weight of an otherwise equal XL and non-XL tyre. We had CrossClimates on a Golf when they first came out and were only available as XL - the car rode far better on those than it did on the standard load Bridgestone Turanza's it came with from new. I noted earlier the standard load 92W Michelin Primacy 3's on our Karoq say max pressure 51psi and that's around the same as others have suggested for XL tyres.

They're not running pressures though. The 215/50R18 92W Michelin Primacy's on our Karoq say max pressure 51psi , and max weight 630kg. But the 630kg rating is at 2.5 bar (36psi). XL 96 load index versions go to 710kg at 2.9 bar (42psi).

I can't say I've ever seen that - can you link to an example? All XL means is the tyre can be inflated to higher pressures and, at higher pressure, will suport more load. At "normal" pressures they're actually very slightly worse than standard load tyres. In theory if you run XL tyres you should up the pressures slightly - but the difference is marginal.

I don't think you can get 92 XL (in the 215/50R18 size). 96 is the XL load index in that size. FWIW our Karoq has 215/50/R18 92W's - Michelin Primacy 3's. They need a lot of care when pulling out of damp junctions to not have them scrabbling for grip. Wife (who normally takes no interest in cars whatsoever) has been mithering to have winter tyres fitted. I should also add that I've dropped tyres back down to the pressure stated on the fuel flap label - 2.1 bar (30.5psi). It seemed bonkers low - our Tiguan was 36 and daughter's Kamiq is same, so quite why Karoq is so low, I don't know. But the cold front grip does seem better (as you'd expect). I'm nervous about making the wheels more susceptible to pot-hole damage though.