Hi guys,

So my previous car was Octavia 3 2.0TDI with 150BHP and now my Octavia 4 is 1.5 TSI 150BHP. Both with manual gearbox. Generally I drive diesel cars, but as the horsepower is the same I kinda expected the same dynamics from both engines. Maybe it is subjective but I feel like the petrol engine is much worse than the diesel. I drive pretty leisurely, but when I need to overtake I want to do it quickly and with reassuring push in the back when I press the gas pedal. But with the petrol engine it's just pathetic. I need to downshift at least 2 gears down and still it takes painfully long to feel any boost. I can't believe that some journalists call this engine quick and responsive. It's anything but.

What's your experience with the engine? Maybe I just need to get used to the petrol engine. And rev it like an idiot for no reason, just to make it move. Who knows  

 

P.S. The drive mode selection makes no difference at all.

 

Best regards,

Martin

We have had this engine for 30 months and more than 26,000 miles in a Karoq and both drive it a leisurely style changing up early at around 2,000rpm but if the mood takes you it will sing upto 7,000rpm in the lower gears. Having also owned the 2.0 litre 150bhp diesel in the Mk3 Octavia I know what you mean about the torque difference as the diesel produced 246lb'ft when standard and a might 317lb/ft with a remap. Best economy from the diesel was 71mpg and 66mpg with the 1.5TSi petrol.

Yehh it’ll all be down to the torque from a Diesel that a petrol can’t replicate at the same bhp. I drove a Superb Diesel 150Bhp 1.5L a couple of days ago and I was surprised at how responsive & quick it was to pick up the pace when I pressed down. Not placed back in my seat or anything - but I own a 2016 187 VRS which is lighter & has that more power and the 2020 150 Superb Diesel actually wasn’t that bad in comparison. I must look up the torque comparison on both 🤔 

A lot is made of bhp but a lot of that early punch comes from the torque. And as has been mentioned the Rev range & gear choice will need to be adjusted from Diesel to petrol. 

Sounds like you are maybe used to the torque of a diesel geared engine.

Petrol engines work better with higher revs 

Indeed. I’ve had bigger petrol engines (2.0T, 2.5T) that you can drive like a diesel. Smaller though and you can’t really do it.

I've had various diesels since the late 90's and I realise swapping to a turbo petrol will be a bit of a culture shock for me.

I'll miss the low down grunt of the diesel, but I'll enjoy the extra revs of the petrol.

Hopefully I won't regret changing to petrol from diesel.

What on earth happened to the latest 1.5 TSI engine over the 150 hp 1.4 TSI and older 1.5 TSI in the mk 3  ?

150 hp Petrol use to be two or three tenths quicker that the diesel and now it is the other way round. Why ? 

 

Mark 3 figures 

Hatch - OCTAVIA SE
                                         1.4 TSI  150 PS        1.4 TSI  150 PS  DSG             1.5 TSI   150 PS       1.6 TDI  115 PS     1.6 TDI   115 PS  DSG                2.0 TDI 150 PS
0 to 60 mph - secs         7.8                            7.9                                            7.9                            9.8                         9.8                                                8.1 

@lol-lol

If those are 'Official Figures' from Skoda they are just fiction as so much else is.

Then you need to know if there is the usual error as some say 0-60 MPH and are actually 0-62 mph (100kmph) figures.

 

As to what a light person in an empty car can do, that matters maybe to a Taxi driver heading to get a fare, but what about with 3 passengers and their luggage, 

or just a car with family and friends being carried, and a full tank?

 

Even Mat gets his 0-60 and 0-62 messed up.  Odd how long it takes some to do that extra 2 mph.....

http://briskoda.net/forums/topic/423600-car-wows-surprising-0-62-test-result

 

 

 

22 hours ago, e-Roottoot said:

@lol-lol

If those are 'Official Figures' from Skoda they are just fiction as so much else is.

Then you need to know if there is the usual error as some say 0-60 MPH and are actually 0-62 mph (100kmph) figures.

 

As to what a light person in an empty car can do, that matters maybe to a Taxi driver heading to get a fare, but what about with 3 passengers and their luggage, 

or just a car with family and friends being carried, and a full tank?

 

Even Mat gets his 0-60 and 0-62 messed up.  Odd how long it takes some to do that extra 2 mph.....

http://briskoda.net/forums/topic/423600-car-wows-surprising-0-62-test-result

 

Indeed, all quite strange and we are only getting part of truth from Skoda.

 

1.4 TSI has been measured at upwards of 160 hp on some rolling roads and seems to exhibit more tuning potential with 190 hp being quite in range with a chipping.

Oddly getting more hp when chipped than the 1. TSI evo, clearly some of those NOX lower measure strangling in ways the 1.4 TSI does not.

 

Still have not seen a reason why the hybrids/PHEVs keep the 1.4 TSI where as others have the 1.5 TSI, space or the extra tech just not needed to get the emissions where they want them.

 

Mk 3 has a great advantage over the mk 2 ie over 100kgs and great to see the mk 4 getting its Aero Drag Coefficient down to 0.24 for the hatch and 0.26 for the estate, should help give great MPG. 

 

@lol-lol

Simples, the 1.4 TSI 150ps non ACT / COD is well tried and tested as to the last built on sale.

But the Co2 g/km was Inaccurate / Implausible / Subject of VW Group cheating in testing of VW, SEAT & Audis.

Even up to 2017 in the Hybrids.

 

So now the WLTP / RDE2 testing can allow them to show actual low Co2 g/km while still being all kiolgy.

 

The Mild Hybrids go with the new e-DSG's in the 1.0 tsi & 1.5 TSI EVO (ACT) where a few more years of kidology can go on with WLTP & RDE2 Certification.

 

The 1.4 TSI's stayed available in the VW Sharran / SEAT Alhambra in Europe, and are in various vehicles Australia and parts of North America and proving popular.

1.4 TSI's and 8 speed Automatics even as with a Skoda Karoq in Australia where Emissions can be as they are, test and tell the truth  and sell the cars without fear or prosecutions..

 

 

 

 

Edited 15 August, 20205 yr by e-Roottoot

1 hour ago, e-Roottoot said:

@lol-lol

Simples, the 1.4 TSI 150ps non ACT / COD is well tried and tested as to the last built on sale.

But the Co2 g/km was Inaccurate / Implausible / Subject of VW Group cheating in testing of VW, SEAT & Audis.

Even up to 2017 in the Hybrids.

 

So now the WLTP / RDE2 testing can allow them to show actual low Co2 g/km while still being all kiolgy.

 

The Mild Hybrids go with the new e-DSG's in the 1.0 tsi & 1.5 TSI EVO (ACT) where a few more years of kidology can go on with WLTP & RDE2 Certification.

 

The 1.4 TSI's stayed available in the VW Sharran / SEAT Alhambra in Europe, and are in various vehicles Australia and parts of North America and proving popular.

1.4 TSI's and 8 speed Automatics even.

 

Well I love the 1.4 TSI 150 hp, have been looking forward to more than 7 speed so sorry to not see 8 or 9 speed boxes as with other marques and models.

 

The proper hybrid Mk4 do sound interesting but the battery range of 30 miles a bit low for my liking as I tend to do 125 mile journeys so lecky on providing a quarter of the journey power is light.

The over 7 second 0-100 km/hr also a bit shabby for such a car so hopefully reality will be in the 6s where it belongs.  

 

8 speed box is a Japanese item so not sure VW will want to use it in large volume but rather use their own more than 7 speed box, I think the 10 speed was dropped as it was not viable.

 

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2019/MC-10159424-0001.pdf

 

Edited 15 August, 20205 yr by lol-lol

I have driven diesels until the mk4.

Yes diesels seem to have an upper hand in acceleration, but that is due to the torque. Diesels have more torque. 

 

The Octavia is perfectly fine with the 250Nm. I don't know what you expect from 250Nm but it is sufficient. 

 

9 minutes ago, OctaviaMK4 said:

I have driven diesels until the mk4.

Yes diesels seem to have an upper hand in acceleration, but that is due to the torque. Diesels have more torque. 

 

The Octavia is perfectly fine with the 250Nm. I don't know what you expect from 250Nm but it is sufficient. 

 

My 2.0 litre petrol has 514nm of torque which is also sufficient I find and no I don't tow a caravan.

21 hours ago, shyVRS245 said:

My 2.0 litre petrol has 514nm of torque which is also sufficient I find and no I don't tow a caravan.             You going to share your rolling road print out and any acceleration data sometime  ???

 

What is important is power at points across the useable rev range rather than torque. A plot of how much horsepower is available at 20%, 30% thru to 100% of the useable revs what is the area beneath the curve for the gear change points between each gear.  VW seem to have got something quite weak with the 1.5 TSI evo, a turbo petrol should generally be about 5% quicker than a diesel with the same HP due to less weight of the vehicle and less inertial mass of the engine components which have to be spun up to speed.  1.5 TSI evo seems a bit of a weak offering in the VW stable and is surpassed by engines like the Renault/Mercedes 1.3 TCE which produces more power ie over 160 hp and as much torque but is better on fuel.  

 

@shyVRS245 Here is an engine with 7 M nm of torque and over 100,000 hp, it does 20 mph in the vehicle it is fitted in to.  It is power/weight and many other factors that count to fast acceleration.

  Built in Finland, the RT-flex96C's fourteen cylinders can generate 107,389HP with more than 7,000,000Nm of torque — that's enough to power an entire suburban town. The engine weighs 2,300 tons and stands 44-feet tall and 90-feet long – more than a four-story building.

On 15/08/2020 at 21:01, shyVRS245 said:

My 2.0 litre petrol has 514nm of torque which is also sufficient I find and no I don't tow a caravan.

 

Irrelevant post again about how powerful your car is. You are boring, create a thread about yourself and your car and post every few hours about fast and powerful your cars are. You can keep reading about yourself over abd over again then. 

LOL!

I feel this petrol engine is very close to a diesel. 4th gear is a great puller! 

My previous car was a 1.9 twin turbo diesel with 240bhp and 490nm (available from 1600rpm).

 

Recently drove a golf estate with a 1.5 TSI ACT and DSG box.

 

And now have a MK2 Octavia 1.4 TSI DSG.

 

In all honesty I have not once missed the torque. I've overtaken a couple of times and never felt lacking in response. Yeah it's not quite the shove in the back.

 

When just driving normally the petrols have more than enough torque to pootle along without stressing the engine.

 

The quietness and smoothness are a massive plus.

 

The engines can't be compared by just their peak power alone though. Obviously a diesel is always going to have a bit more torque. But then the petrols have a wider torque and power band usually (just lower peak torque).

You can't really compare standard petrol engines to similar powered diesel versions. The petrol engine will be quieter, smoother but needs to be pushed a fair bit more than the diesel to get anything like the same performance and most of us who've had diesel cars in the past don't tend to drive that way anymore; hence reason why petrol engines feel that bit slower if you're driving the car in the same way as your old diesel version. I try nursing my current car to get better fuel economy but its hard going since the software "update" which took away at least 10-12% average fuel economy and left the engine feeling a bit flatter all the time. 

 

I've had the 1.6 TD engine in an early mark 3 Octavia and most of the time it actually felt faster and more powerful than my current 1.5 petrol engine. Even though that is a lowish power output from the 1.6 TD engine it has a lot of torque once you get it over 30mph; lower speeds driving around town it will feel quite flat if you're in too high a gear, which is quite easy with the cheapskate five speed box and gappy gear ratios. Before the Octavia 1.6TD I had a Mondeo 2.2 TD Estate; definitely a wolf in sheep's clothing with incredible torque all the way through but an absolute pig of a clutch made driving it painful in town traffic.

Edited 24 September, 20205 yr by AllanDJ
spell checker!

The 1.5 TSI engine has had a tough life, it really didn't get off to the best of starts with the well documented lack of low down power, more so when cold and during low speed starts.

 

It's also a relatively new engine in VAG's line-up in its current guise and is therefore very emissions-focused. I can't imagine VAG spending much R&D on any new petrol or diesel engines so there is a real chance this will be one of their last. We all know what driving down emissions does to power output and drivability. Long term reliability still remains unproven.

 

Those engines that have had Gasoline Particulate Filters (GPF's) fitted have been known to be down on power too, another restrictive component that seems to have a more adverse affect than DPF's?

 

Moving from a 2.0 TDI 150PS Octavia to a much heavier 1.4 TSI 150PS Kodiaq I was surprised how fast the little petrol engine pulls the Kodiaq along compared to the Octavia. Both nice engines to drive though.

On 27/09/2020 at 19:40, silver1011 said:

The 1.5 TSI engine has had a tough life, it really didn't get off to the best of starts with the well documented lack of low down power, more so when cold and during low speed starts.

 

It's also a relatively new engine in VAG's line-up in its current guise and is therefore very emissions-focused. I can't imagine VAG spending much R&D on any new petrol or diesel engines so there is a real chance this will be one of their last. We all know what driving down emissions does to power output and drivability. Long term reliability still remains unproven.

 

Those engines that have had Gasoline Particulate Filters (GPF's) fitted have been known to be down on power too, another restrictive component that seems to have a more adverse affect than DPF's?

 

Moving from a 2.0 TDI 150PS Octavia to a much heavier 1.4 TSI 150PS Kodiaq I was surprised how fast the little petrol engine pulls the Kodiaq along compared to the Octavia. Both nice engines to drive though.

 

Well said, the 1.5 TSi engine is not what you would call a normal engine. Personally I wish that I'd taken the cheaper 1 litre TSi engine than the 1.5 version as no matter how I drive it I cannot get anything like the fuel economy that it had pre software update and it feels kind of flat too. Yet some people with the mark 4 Octavia are reporting really good fuel economy with this engine straight out of the garage, without any great effort. It kind of makes me wonder whether there has been another secret software update to fix some of the problems that the first update caused?

 

On 11/08/2020 at 21:21, musaka said:

Hi guys,

So my previous car was Octavia 3 2.0TDI with 150BHP and now my Octavia 4 is 1.5 TSI 150BHP. Both with manual gearbox. Generally I drive diesel cars, but as the horsepower is the same I kinda expected the same dynamics from both engines. Maybe it is subjective but I feel like the petrol engine is much worse than the diesel. I drive pretty leisurely, but when I need to overtake I want to do it quickly and with reassuring push in the back when I press the gas pedal. But with the petrol engine it's just pathetic. I need to downshift at least 2 gears down and still it takes painfully long to feel any boost. I can't believe that some journalists call this engine quick and responsive. It's anything but.

What's your experience with the engine? Maybe I just need to get used to the petrol engine. And rev it like an idiot for no reason, just to make it move. Who knows  

 

P.S. The drive mode selection makes no difference at all.

 

Best regards,

Martin

It's an old thread but I was bit bored and it piqued my interest again.

 

Trying to compare a diesel and petrol engine with similar peak power outputs is rarely going to make the petrol look good.

People talk about how diesel engines have more "torque", which is true, but it's a bit of a red herring.

Power output at given RPM is what matters, and generally diesel cars have more power at low revs than petrol cars do. (Especially if the petrol engine is a smaller capacity).

You can convert ft/lbs torque to bhp and vice versa easily enough, but I've used an online tool here. (https://getcalc.com/electrical-torque-hp-conversion-calculator.htm)

 

Anyway, here are the power characteristics of the two engines, and the same data in graphical form.

For the calculation, I used BHP, not PS, for which there's a conversion tool here. (https://www.convertunits.com/from/ps/to/horsepower+[international])

 

You can see that at 2000rpm, the diesel is providing about 95 BHP, but the petrol is only providing about 70 BHP.

At 3000 rpm, the diesel is already nearly at peak power at about 143 BHP, while at the same rpm, the petrol is at about 108 BHP (give or take a bit).

In the case of these two engines, the diesel is always more powerful than the petrol at the same RPM, until the diesel runs out of puff as it goes over 3500 and power drops off (not that the manufacturer provides that data), just as the petrol is really getting into its stride.

And that is why this 2.0 150PS diesel "feels" quicker at lower revs than the 1.5TSI 150PS, because it is quite a bit more powerful throughout the rev range of the diesel, until it reaches max RPM.

 

Edited 9 October, 20205 yr by EnterName
I changed the graph axies so they were identical.

But a 2.0 litre engine is always going to out perform a 1.5 litre engine (petrol or diesel). My 2.0 litre Superb only produced 369nm at a high 4,500rpm until the remap sorted that out with 480nm at 2,400rpm and a maximum of 514nm now at 2,800rpm now compare that to the 340nm 2.0 litre diesel. Also the diesel takes longer to get to 60mph compared to the 1.5 litre petrol as it runs out of usable revs compared to a petrol. The gap would be even greater were they to keep accelerating upto 100mph. Driving the wife's Karoq 1.5 litre manual petrol tonight it averaged 54mpg on my 27 mile commute and petrol is cheaper to buy than diesel in the UK at least.

2 minutes ago, shyVRS245 said:

But a 2.0 litre engine is always going to out perform a 1.5 litre engine (petrol or diesel). My 2.0 litre Superb only produced 369nm at a high 4,500rpm until the remap sorted that out with 480nm at 2,400rpm and a maximum of 514nm now at 2,800rpm now compare that to the 340nm 2.0 litre diesel. Also the diesel takes longer to get to 60mph compared to the 1.5 litre petrol as it runs out of usable revs compared to a petrol. The gap would be even greater were they to keep accelerating upto 100mph. Driving the wife's Karoq 1.5 litre manual petrol tonight it averaged 54mpg on my 27 mile commute and petrol is cheaper to buy than diesel in the UK at least.

Hi Shy!

I was just responding to @musaka's original post about the 1.5 TSI feeling a lot slower than the 2.0 TDI, and showing why it is.

There's a whole host of different factors that go into choosing your engine, and if you're happy with the engine in your car, then you made the right choice.

But an informed choice is the best choice, unless you're really lucky.

(I was just about to do comparison graphs for other Octavia engines for my own amusement.)

Agreed. It's really is silly to compare the engines so closely.

 

They are different engines. Point.

 

Yes thy happen to have the same peak power but that's about it.

 

I personally am fully converted to petrol now. And would take a 1.5 TSI over a 2.0 TDI any day.

 

The petrol just feels better to drive and yeah it doesn't have the same punch but when you're just wanting to pootle around then it doesn't matter.