No, everything still works as I described in my post. I must say that I am relieved as I was definitely more than a little apprehensive when I started the job. I still occasionally press the button on the tailgate to close it, but 6 years of doing that is a hard habit to break.

This is fairly simple job!

 

Gas struts from the regular Octavia without electric bootlid fits plug&play on the same bal-joints.

 

3T9827721 will plug the holes where the  cables came out.

 

Then you have to disconnect the cable to the lock mechanism-motor on the chassi (not the bootlid).

 

And apply 12V to it so the motor pulls back the metal rod to locked position. After that  you don't need to connect the cable back or else it will release the metal rod to open position which you don't want. Just let the cable be unplugged. You won't need that function anymore.

 

After that your bootlid will lock flush!

 

Otherwise your boot will rattle a bit and the alignment will be a bit off, but it will lock properly.

 

Feed the 12V to the lock-motor it will be worth it!

 

No need for any programming. It will beep like it did before and no warning lights will appear.

There is a video here showing how the lock works (about 2 minutes in), and suggests you might be able to use a screwdriver to 'fool' the strike plate to lock down, at which point you might be able to disconnect it so its stays in the locked position. Hope thats useful. :-)

 

 

Sorry for the old thread resurrection, want to keep all relevant info in the same place. My Superb estate MK2.5 is currently failing to lift the boot lid all the way up - beeps and cuts out at the top. Works OK if you stop it early and press the close button again. Sounds very much like electric struts starting to fail. My plan is to replace with cheapish gas struts for now then take my time to go through @Lutz excellent video to see if I can do his guitar string repair

I'll hope the latching motor will still work OK after converting struts to gas but if not I'll do the striker plate modification.

BUT before I do this, is there anything else I can easily check that might be causing the fault (e.g. boot control module, corroded pivots, micro switches etc)? Car has had a new battery in the last month.

Time has passed and after many repairs of the struts I decided to save some time and order new struts from china (Aliexpress). They work well even in rough nordic conditions with heavy snow and rain. So worth to consider these cheap 100€/each struts, rather downgrading them to normal gas struts.

On 28/03/2026 at 11:19, Lutz said:

Time has passed and after many repairs of the struts I decided to save some time and order new struts from china (Aliexpress). They work well even in rough nordic conditions with heavy snow and rain. So worth to consider these cheap 100€/each struts, rather downgrading them to normal gas struts.

Interesting thanks! Available European suppliers of these things seem very limited and highly priced. Can you recommend a particular supplier / part / link you found on AliExpress?

@medward20000 , here is link of struts which I bought recently:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008703450334.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.44.62b41802CVbenw

From EU and delivery time is relatively short. I don´t know whether there is some limitation with UK, but there are plenty of similar price range struts in Aliexpress.

Great, thanks. Only around 100 euros for a pair, it's worth a try!

Does anyone know if you can fit those to a car without the electric struts as standard? So a retrofit.

I think not - there is also a boot motor control unit that looks after the motor speed, auto-stop / beeps if it meets resistance etc. But I did spot a kit on AliExpress that looks like it has all the components you'd need - not sure if it would be a big hassle to fit and what the reliability would be like.