Graham Butcher

Like I said before, the assumption you arrived at with the lack of a headlight levelling control was a red light and a warning bell to me because there are cars with LED headlights, that do also have the levelling controls on the dashboard. I did also tell you that I was not an expert with OBD11, so I could not offer you any advice other than what I have already given. @langers2k has already confirmed that your car does have LED headlights, and he also has given a logical explanation of the function of module 4B is and how it operates, so you know need to pay close attention to his instructions as he is far more qualified on that topic than I am, I already told you I had zero knowledge of that, batteries and charging etc, yes, that is well within my ballpark. I still say that you have not yet solved why you were having flat battery issues and I suspect that until you discover why, you will suffer the same problem sometime in the future. In the meantime, I'll leave you in the capable hands of @langers2kand he'll talk you through the steps to reactivate the levelling function of your headlights, and no, that would NOT be the cause of your occasional sudden loss of battery power. Good luck.

Ok I'm learning here, so if the car does indeed have LED headlights but they aren't matrix type, then what is the function of the enable LED headlight, or disable LED headlight? The car must have functioning headlights otherwise it would be illegal to drive the car even in daylight and surely the car has been driven in 16 months after dark, so what is being used as headlights?

Nissan Qashqai have LED headlights but also have headlight adjuster on dashboard so that's not a good indicator.

Just because it says it is not enabled, does not mean that it is incorrect, it would only be applicable to a car that actually has LED headlights, do you actually know if your headlights are LED, Halogen or Xenon? What you are seeing might well be an option that some Octavia's have, but this will vary my the actual model within the range, or it may an option that can be specified as a factory fitment at the time of ordering the car when new. Now I don't know quite how the OBD11 device you have actually works, it might be a simple matter of toggling between Enable or Disable, or it asks you to input a long string of numbers and letters. Do you have a manual that was supplied with the device, if you have it might be an idea to read it and if it offers help in that area. I'm not an expert in that area at all so I cannot really advise on that. Maybe if you post again with the make and model information on the device, maybe another member might be able to help you further, but I can't.

Sorry to have to say this to you, but this is a classic case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. You really don't have a clue as to what you did last time when you played around with the coding, and you might well have made things worse. Now you're thinking about going back into the coding again to try and rectify what you did, but you don't truthfully know what you did, so how do you know that you can undo what you did and or what the original coding was. This is utter and complete madness in my view, and you do seriously risk doing serious damage. Please, I beg you, leave it alone, you have been given perfectly sound advice so far with no risk of damage to your car, so please do yourself a favour and book it into a Škoda specialist who will be able to recode it back to the original, and then they can work from there. If you do a Google search, there are loads of Skoda repair centres in the London area. Whenever doing anything that can screw your car up like coding the ECU's, the golden rule is to double-check what you're doing is correct, and also to write down what the codes were before you change anything so in the case of things going wrong, you can go back and input the old code again, so you can be returned to the position you were in before.

It just runs off lol.

Oh I see, but there is no reason for the larger capacity battery to give you a problem as long as the system is coded with the capacity etc it will still charge it up OK, so the battery was never the problem, it might well have been before they fitted that bigger battery, but that battery itself has not been the issue at all. The basic difference between the batteries is that the smaller capacity is fine for smaller engines, especially petrol engines like yours because their compression ratio is much lower than a diesel like mine, which does need the extra capacity because diesels have far higher compression ratio and so the starter motor will need the AH capacity from the battery. So just don't get too complacent that the flat battery problem has been resolved, because it quite simply hasn't. Whatever the cause is, is still there lurking waiting to strike again and mark my words, it will when you least expect it.

I love toffee pop corn, which is really just another form of sugar puffs I expect.

So they all say that the alternator is fine, and yet you still get a flat battery, so something is clearly not right, the only way to eliminate the charger is completely unplug it each time you leave the car, if you are still getting a flat battery, then you must have the entire electrical system checked out, and you might have to be without your car for a few days while they track down the problem. In one of those videos I sent you, it took a few days to discover what was causing the problem and he left the car running for a whole day before the fault showed up. Like I said before, things have got really complicated these last few years and they will get even more complicated when we all drive EV's in the future because there is so much electronics and networking in those cars and that is going to be one massive steep learning curve for the garages.

Wow, yes I could imagine grain could do that.

This means nothing without photos to show the points being discussed.

Yes the £140 price is about right, I had to have my car diagnosed a couple of years ago when I was getting a ABS error on the N/S rear wheel. I managed to out the sensor and with my equipment it seemed to OK but the error would keep happening from time to time. So I decided i needed better diagnostic tools and these are so expensive, I tried to book it into my Skoda garage but they were fully booked for the whole month, so I booked it into VAG specialist for having a proper scan done with the same tools as the factory uses and yes it was the sensor that failed enough my tests showed it was OK, a new sensor was fitted, and the problem never happened again. So yes, the scanning is costly but if it can pinpoint the faulty part and once the part is replaced and the problem is cured, it well worth the cost.

@automass You said in an earlier post that you suspect the charger because the dashcam switches off when the stop-start cuts in. When this happens, dashcam is still working while the engine is off, right? But it switches off when the engine starts is just highlighting a completely unrelated problem, and this is solely to do with your dashcam. When the engines starts, the starter motor is drawing several hundreds of amps from the battery, causing a momentary volt drop which the dashcam cannot accept and switches off. How old is the dashcam? I suspect that the internal battery, like the one in the photo has failed due to age, or it has a super capacitor to store power and has failed, or, you also said that it was only a cheap dashcam, so that means that it has neither of these inside to provide enough power to keep it running when the battery voltage drops, as it does when the starting the car up. If it is the latter, then it has always done this, but you have never really noticed until now and because the car not starting is a massive problem to you, that your mind is looking for something to blame and has latched onto the dashcam and the charger which is providing the 5v power supply as being linked and the cause. When in reality they are a symptom of another problem exasperated by the low battery voltage while starting the car. I got one of these 12v to 5v convertors that needs to be hardwired to a circuit that is only active while the ignition is on, so that means I have zero things left plugged into my 12v sockets which on Skoda's are alive 24/7, so when I stop the car and leave it, my dashcam and my TomTom satnav are automatically switched off, and cannot flatten the battery/

This always happens when the is at normal running temperature? The misfire is causing the stop/start from working as the ECU thinks the car will struggle to start if the ignition system is suffering from misfires. The charger is having no effect on how the car behaves, please wipe that thought from your mind, you are going down a dead end with that idea. What the charger is doing however is draining the battery if you leave it plugged in so always pull it out when not in use. The stop/start is very sensitive to things that may cause problems with the engine starting again, so it will always play safe and not stop to avoid leaving you exposed in what may be a dangerous position. So fix the misfire and it will work. Never disable any module as they all talk to each other anyway and will bypass a faulty module if it can. Did you not watch those videos I posted?

That was a pretty high shutter speed on the shot, if you'd tried it on something like 120th you would have got some lovely propeller blur given it the impression of speed. As a matter of interest, where was this taken?

On a normal ship I expect they would use water as cargo ships in particular place cargo in holds and there are many holds along the length of the ship so they could theoretically almost flood a hold if required to fight a fire as there are watertight bulkheads between holds. That is not the case on car carriers as the entire level/deck is just like that of a multi-storey car park with ramps going from floor to floor which can be sealed off. But there are no partitions to break up that entire level, so water would be free to rush about the deck/level as the ship rolls on the waves. The same reason why they have to tie each car down to the deck and that prevents fire blankets being used to seal the fire off

@toot Its my take on what they are doing is trying to cool the battery packs down don't need to completely submerge the cars, just enough water to cover the battery levels, the cover is just to contain the fire and prevent it spreading to others if it goes nuclear. Its my understanding that with car carriers they do not use water to fight fires because the water slooshing about on the decks will make the ship unstable and capsize like the MS Herald of Free Enterprise did so what do is to seal each deck off, hence no windows in the ships hull and then release vast amounts of stored CO2 which is kept in huge tanks on deck or on the 1st level below. Because the batteries being used in EV's they as part of the combustion process they generate vast amounts of oxygen which negates the CO2 so the fire will continue to burn. In all the videos on TV news of the fire, there was never any real presence of the normal black smoke that normal hydrocarbons generate when burning, a giveaway of the presence of EV batteries being in the fire was that the smoke was more white / light grey that such batteries generate. And as you correctly said, they won't use seawater for fear of the water slooshing about and making the ship capsize, plus sal****er reacts with batteries and could cause them to reignite again and again as the salt forms conductive bridges between the cells.

I'm not sure what you are telling me here, could you explain a bit more to avoid confusion?

@toot Yes, I agree, but sadly there are many who just cannot accept anything said against EV's regardless of the reasons. Have you seen the latest videos of the cars being unloaded from the Fremantle Highway at all? There are a few videos including official Dutch ones, and they have started to pull out some of the EVs, not sure if they are pure EV's or hybrids, but they damaged so certainly were involved in the fire and there is one in particular, a Mercedes-Benz that has dropped into a water tank and covered by a fireproof blanket as it is burning, weeks after the fire has effectively gone out on the ship. The videos also show more water tanks being prepared for yet more cars to occupy. Still no further to knowing what caused the fire in the first place, I expect if it is found to be ship related or ICE, we will be told in due course, but fully expect if it was an EV of some sort, that the report will be embargoed and quietly forgotten about.

The beauty about going backwards a few decades is that things were just so simple then and there simply loads of people out at weekends doing maintenance on their vehicles, something you rarely see now, hence why garages are normally booked up for weeks. The other advantage, at least here in the UK (you might be the same in France) and that after so many years I think you become VED free and also MOT free.

He also says that he loves the way the car drives, all that low down torque and sheer grunt that it gives, and all that waffle he says about not being as memorable as old ICE cars like those in the museum etc, well all of that will surely depend on what cars were around in your childhood, so a child of the 2030s is more likely to grow up with EV's, and so they will in a few years be the cars that they will have fond memories of when they reach his age, all of that is a given in my book. What I do find of interest and to a large extent agree with him is that of the range between charges does not really make EV's a direct like for like replacement and also the point that I feel he is trying to make is that currently you are unable to jump into your EV and just take off for a long trip and stick to the same route that you would with an ICE, you just know that when you are getting low on fuel and the warning bong and light etc have been activated, that you will come across a filling station a few miles. All without having to deviate away from the main road and direct route that you are on and also that when you get there, there will be more than 1 or 2 pumps for you to use, and you won't have to wait long if they are all in use. With an EV that is not the case today, that to me is really what he is saying and if they can find ways to address those issues what is going to be left for him??? I suppose, what I'm saying is that it up to the viewer to try and read between the lines a bit and decide for yourself what is the real truth.

Could be for dramatic effect, who knows, but it doesn't make the rest of his videos less interesting, the motor museum for instance was very interesting, his food videos and his American videos are entertaining as well as educational.

Even videos like his with the obvious clickbait can contain a lot of good content. Is the clickbait really any different to a trailer for a film or indeed almost any product you can think off, don't car manufacturers use similar but less obvious ploys to get us all to watch the advert, get a test drive etc, its just a means of attracting attention, it's that simple and as you rightly said, people need to decide for themselves, but I'll throw a caveat in here, if they don't watch then they shouldn't pass any comment about it either.

OK, but there is noway that the charger is having any effect on the start/stop system, the charger and the power socket is not even connected to the cars network system, it purely connected to the battery via a fuse, so you can completely wipe any thought that is having an effect from your mind. But you do need to unplug it when you leave the car, to stop it draining the battery.

Thank god for that, he is clearly struggling with accepting the fact that it is not s simple as he thought it was. Don't worry, I knew you were only joking. But you are right, he is a genius and modern cars are just complicated, and they have become so in order to meet stringent emission standards and increase their efficiency at the same time, but the complexity you put into a car, the more there is to go wrong, they became more expensive to repair and of course the electronics are designed to be throw away items and generally none repairable.