Hello I have a clutch fault and I'm not sure what to change the slave or the master cylinder. I was driving and the pedal felt really soft and only had pressure on the bottom of the travel, I parked it up and from the next day had no pedal at all. It hit the floor and stayed there. I looked at it again 5 days later and the pedal had a little bit of pressure again and pumped up to completely normal again ! I test drove it and it works perfectly? There is no leak on the master cylinder and no leak on the bottom of the gearbox. The fluid level has not dropped at all? Is something letting in air? The actual clutch and pressure plate is perfectly fine. It's a 4x4 2.0 diesel so it's going to cost an arm and a leg to get all that replaced 😱

Slave cylinder, yes its entraining (is that a word in English?) air.

It's not working properly, even if you bleed the air (very easy) the problem will repeat and will become more frequent, at the end I was having to bleed my clutch every 15 minutes during urban driving, when at cruising speed (no clutch use) whenever I came to a junction, off ramp or roundabout I had to frantically look around for somewhere to exit up a kerb or whatever to not block the traffic if it failed again, once I was stuck in the toll booth of a péage!

If you can DIY it does not cost much other than time, I paid €300 including delivery from Spain for a clutch, DMF and concentric slave cylinder.

If you can't DIY then pretty much everything on a modern vehicle in a modern garage costs an arm and a leg.

Thanks for your reply. Wow I'm so disappointed in Skoda and VW. This car has been unreliable. Iv spent loads of money on it and now it wants a massive strip out, £1300 job just to replace a £30 slave cylinder 😱. What was wrong with the old design when it was fitted to the top of the bell housing with 2 bolts!

Your vehicle is 9 years old you cannot expect reliability, if you want reliability as crazy as it sounds buy something older!

YMMV - we've had an A3, Leon, Ibiza, Golf and now an Octavia from about 2009, all without any major issues.

That said, they're definitely getting worse. The Audi is a 1.4 A3 just about to cross 110k - no significant issues. The Ibiza had an engine sensor go kaput a week after purchase, and while the Octavia has been brilliant, when the battery went last year it was an absolute nightmare.

Older is no guarantee of reliability though. Simplicity yes, but in the case of my first car (a 2007 VW Fox), even older VAG cars can be utter piles of unreliable crap.

I'm gutted, always had vag group cars, but I might have to go to a more reliable Japanese brand. It's had so many faults, even recently the touchscreen stopped working, then AM radio frequency stopped working, then caliper seized up, then doors started rusting, then paint peeled off on top of windscreen, now this slave needs doing...

4 hours ago, OccyVRS said:

Older is no guarantee of reliability though. Simplicity yes, but in the case of my first car (a 2007 VW Fox), even older VAG cars can be utter piles of unreliable crap.

I meant older still, the late 90's early 2000's was the sweet spot, trouble is finding one now will likely mean a high mileage perhaps neglected example and there will naturally be age related reliability problems.