Well, wasn't on for quite a while ... the car still runs as it should, currently on some 188.000 km. Had to replace the gear stick surrounding trim (where the ESP an parking sensors buttons are), due to a few cracks that appeared on the top side and the plastic was protruding upwards (didn't make sense to glue it, the crack would still be visible). The required part no. is 3T0863212B, found one used and very cheap on eBay.

 

Will post the photos of the process once I prepare them.

The "new" trim piece

 

 

At this point, I've already deliberately broke pieces of the old trim in an attempt to recover the chrome part

 

The chrome part survived from the old trim, but can't be easily swapped to the 2nd trim piece (without breaking something)

 

My car is equipped with a gearbox cylinder lock device, and when it was installed who knows when, the cables were put below it, instead of under it (red circle), meaning I had much more room to maneuver making it much more difficult to unhook the cables from the connectors and then connecting them back

 

How the buttons look like (4 different colors, the bottom connector parts)

 

Nearly done, this "new" trim looks much better, at least it has no cracks on it

 

The whole procedure took me some 30 minutes (already knew how to remove the gearshift lever from before)

 

9 hours ago, vborovic said:

the cables were put below it, instead of under it (red circle)

 

Obviously I meant "instead of above it" ... 😂