At an additional cost of £145, I pondered this for quite a while as it didn’t appear to offer anything other than ‘stiffer’ steering on a car with standard suspension, manual transmission and manual aircon.

 

I am so glad that I included it. The ‘stiffer’ steering alone is worthwhile as it takes away the ‘floaty’ feeling of the standard setting, especially at low speed, but the real benefit is the ability to set ‘Drive’ to Normal, Sport or Eco.

 

Of course, I set it to Sport to start in order to best appreciate what the car could do but after a while I experimented with a custom setting of Sport steering and Eco Drive. The effect was remarkable. I thought I was able to drive economically (except when annoyed by someone driving too close behind) but the Eco Drive mode does it far better than I can. I managed 49mpg on the weekly 22 mile round shopping trip in Sport Mode but in Eco mode this increased to 55.4mpg. The only noticeable difference was a slight reduction in torque on a long uphill section.

 

I don’t often praise ‘software’ controls in cars (Why do programmers in Wolfsburg think they know better than me, the driver, when I should turn my headlights on?) but on this occasion they do appear to have got it right.

 

It's a shame that it adds 3 'faff points' (the number of times I have to press the button to get to the custom setting) to the startup sequence, in addition to the other 'faff points' of 2 button presses to turn lane assist off, 1 to acknowledge the privacy settings and 1 to turn stop/start off but this seems to be something I will just have to put up with.

@BiscayneDid you further tune your cars handling and suspension by checking what the tyre pressures were at hand over and setting to your needs for load carried, season / weather & then resetting the TPMS?

Hi toot, tyre pressures at handover and today are as per the settings on the inside of the filler cap for the load carried. I haven't reset the TPMS though, do I need to if it's not showing an alarm?

It takes all of a minute to reset after you read the manual on how to reset it.

It is there as a warning of a sudden deflation for those that can not notice a blow out or even just a loss of pressure or change in circumference or the tyre since the TPMS last set.

It will tell you in the manual quite likely to reset the system to check it occasionally.

Thanks, I will do that tomorrow. Funny that you should mention not noticing a blow out - when I first took a scala out on a test drive the salesman neglected to mention 'lane assist'. When the steering jerked because it misread the carraigeway edge, my first thought was that I had suffered a rapid deflation. It's quite unnerving if you have never experienced it before. I forgot to turn it off the other day and having passed through temporary traffic lights on my side of the road, I set a gentle 'glide' back to the left (no waiting traffic) but the camera picked up the centreline and, thinking that it was the carraigeway edge, made a very determined effort to stop me crossing the line. I had to push against it twice before it got the message!

Some are more severe in how they react than others.

Some can be set to how much they do nudge you / or behave.

Using the Indicators where there are  actual lines to cross / lanes to change does mean it is disabled for that manoeuvre.

An update on 'Eco' mode; here is the dashboard summary following a journey from Birmingham Airport to Ross-on-Wye. The M42 had a 50mph limit for most of the distance from the airport to the M5, and there was heavy traffic round Birmingham  Otherwise, speed was 60-70mph. I am quite impressed, as neither of my previous VAG diesels (1.6TDI Golf, 1.9 TDI PD Bora) managed a similar journey at better than 60mpg. The acid test would be to repeat the journey in the other modes but that will have to wait until next year's holiday. Also need to do a full tank to full tank test to determine if the display is accurate.