Hi, apologies if this has been covered before, but it seems like a bit of a minefield. My 2019 Octavia SEL TDI 2.0 DSG estate is saying that it is due an oil service (in 300 miles currently). Car was bought at the end of January last year, when it had 6500 on it. It now has 18,300 ish on it. I was expecting to have to get it serviced when it had done 20k miles, so what I want to know is, if I take my car in for its oil service, will I then have to take it in when it hits 20k for a full service, something I obviously want to avoid? I do around 15k annually, so was planning on being able to take the car for one service a year ideally.

 

I have seen that Skoda do an oil service and inspection, so was thinking about booking it in for that. As this will be the car's first ever service, I was tempted to take it to Skoda, but knowing what dealers charge, I'd really like to take it to the independent garage I have taken all my previous (non-Skoda) cars to.

 

 

 

When it left the factory it was set to do either 18,600 miles or 30,000km or 2 years whichever comes first. Looks like you are bang on schedule for the mileage limit. My advice would be to get this first service with a Skoda dealer and ask them to use Long Life oil which will give you either 2 years or 18,600 miles to the next service. If you have any warranty issues in the first 3 years from it's registration you can take it back to the dealer. The second service is now likely to be after 3 years at which point you can save a few founds and take it out of the Skoda network.

Thanks for that. So, just to clarify, this will be the "oil and inspection service" that they offer? I did wonder about the warranty side of things in relation to taking it to a non-Skoda garage.

1 minute ago, Danbuoy said:

Thanks for that. So, just to clarify, this will be the "oil and inspection service" that they offer? I did wonder about the warranty side of things in relation to taking it to a non-Skoda garage.

You can get a non-Skoda garage to do the first service with genuine Skoda parts but if anything goes wrong before your 3 year warranty is up most Skoda garages will see who did the first service and blame them for doing something to your car and then expect you to pay for whatever work needs doing. For example my wife's Karoq is 3 years old on 26th January 2021 and it has had 1 service at the supplying Skoda dealer at 18,700 miles yet it had to go back for a software update to the ECU plus it also needed 2 new key fobs which became faulty and wouldn't work. All this work was done under warranty and didn't cost me a penny but if I had to pay the work would have been over £500. So the real question is do you feel lucky and is it worth taking the risk and going independent on the first service. Sometimes independent don't know how to reset the service countdown and you end up 12 months and 9,600 miles later saying it needs the 2nd service so you end up not making any savings anyway.

OK, great, thanks for that.