At the end of this month I will have had my Yeti 12 years and been following and contributing to this forum all that time learning a lot on the way. For the first couple of years every so often I'd learn something new about the car and its various setting and potential problems. On Wednesday without warning I had a severe shuddering, loss of power and several warning lights came on. Trying the usual thing of stopping and restarting unfortunately didn't resolve the problem (well, what is life without hope?) so 48 hours and nearly £600 later I got the car back from the garage with a new set of leads and plugs; the diagnostics, which threw up a whole load of seemingly unrelated faults associated with the flat battery of two weeks ago, cost more than the actual repair. But everything seems to be working properly again so as it's the first major unforeseen repair in 12 years I'm happy. Noticing the clock was showing the wrong time I went into the MFD to adjust it and took the opportunity to flick through the other setting to see if anything else needed adjustment. And I saw PDC with its sub-menus for front and rear volume adjustment. Now being a bit slow on the uptake these days I assumed "volume" as "space" - as in boot volume - and so wondered what front and rear volume could be and why it would need adjustment? And, after 12 years of ownership I now know that I can adjust the volume of the front and rear parking sensors!

So can anyone beat 11 years and 50 weeks before finding something new about their car?

(The garage also found slight excess play on the turbo wastegate (whatever that is) so I could be looking at a new turbo in a "two or three years" although hopefully it will last long enough that it will be an easy decision to say at that stage it's not an economic repair).

Maybe I can't beat 12 years, but it did take many years before I found out that when changing the "upside down" oil filter you could undo it half a turn and leave it to let all the old drain out internally from the canister, so that when you took it off completely it didn't go all over the engine !

It does seem a shame that with spark plugs and leads being 100 year old technology they are still failing and causing grief - this seems to be a particular weak point of the 1.2 TSi. Most if not all petrol cars (including my 1.4 TSi) are coil on plug nowadays.

The wastgate flap allows controlled leakage to limit the boost pressure from the turbo. I wouldn't mind betting that this is repairable without needing a new turbo, though probably not by a main dealer.

"The wastgate flap allows controlled leakage to limit the boost pressure from the turbo. I wouldn't mind betting that this is repairable without needing a new turbo, though probably not by a main dealer".

At the moment it is "showing wear" and the garage don't seem too concerned at this stage so with a 12 year old car and the way the car market is changing (and the fact I wouldn't know what to go to next) I'm going to adopt my usual head-in-the-sand-and-wait-and-see approach.

I think I just beat my feature discovery record today. Tried adjusting the passenger door mirror to look down a tad more so that I could see the white line of the parking space. I must have moved the knob on the drivers door clockwise one step too far, as the next thing I knew, both mirrors folded in ! I never knew they could do that, surprised the motors weren't seized after 13 years of inactivity.

Closer scrutiny showed a tiny indecipherable symbol at that knob setting, which is of course normally hidden from the driver's view by the knob.

It's all there on Page 58 of the handbook of course

You can all laugh now......

11 hours ago, Austin 7 said:

......as the next thing I knew, both mirrors folded in ! I never knew they could do that

You may not know then that when you lock the car with the fob, but continue to press the fob lock button for a few seconds the mirrors will fold in? (They will unfold again when you next start the engine)