Today I bought a 2016 1.4TDi DSG Spaceback SE. With 67,000 miles, MOT till Jan 27. Private seller. Previous owner for the last 5 years was an elderly lady. We agreed on a price of £3700 for it.

One downside is that has 4 x assorted cheapo 215/45 R16 tyres on it. With the bigger downside being that they all have plenty of tread left. 🙄

It has parking damage to the rear bumper and front bumper. It's the sort of thing where I'll probably leave it as it is, as it's not going to rust and it doesn't look too tragically bad.

The driver's side sun visor holder, the grey plastic swivel mount thing, next to the A pillar in the roof is cracked, and the sun visor fell off when I moved it to the side window position. It looks like it's an easy enough item to replace with a trim tool and a small flat bladed screwdriver. I have a feeling I might have to buy a whole sun visor assembly, instead of just the small plastic bit that clips into the roof?

The sun visor works OK if you just fold it down for windscreen shading.

The car drives fine. Feels and sounds nice and tight and unworn. As it should be on 67k miles.

The driver's seat is pants. You can tell by looking at it that it's not shaped like a human body is shaped. And it's uncomfortable for any journey lasting longer than 30 minutes. I'm on the look-out for a pair of used SE Sport front seats. Or maybe the upper spec seats from a Toledo.

I'm mildly disappointed with the MPG from my first 60 miles of ownership. It seems to be about on a par with my 2016 Superb Greenline Estate. Which is probably more down to how amazing the Superb Greenline is, than any failings in the Spaceback 1.4 TDi.

I intend getting my local VAG specialist to do a cambelt and water pump change, sooner rather than later. And from there will do my own oil changes every 8,000 miles.

I bought a couple of Morfit cushions. These have made the seats more bearable on long journeys.

I've been surprised at how - almost all of the time - the low power of the 1.4 TDi engine has not been a problem. In general driving it's fast enough for me and my wife's driving style. The only time I've noticed a lack of performance, was when joining the A1 from Stamford, when putting the foot down produced unimpressive acceleration - when compared to our 2010 BMW 330D auto.

Did my first bit of servicing on the car today. The forecast was for 0% chance of rain for the duration of the afternoon. It started raining intermittently when I was stuck into the job. 🙄

The oil change was easy enough. Although it would be better if they had a hatch for the sump plug in the undertray, BMW style, instead of having to take the undertray off. And if the oil filter were at the top of the engine, instead of the bottom. And in a housing for accurate torque setting (with my tools) instead of an old school metal cannister type that I tightened as much as I could by hand with my lacklustre hand-grip and fore-arm strength.

I tightened the sump plug to 25 NM. And the undertray screws by hand feel to a gentle torque, due to the rusty nature of the clips they screw into.

The cabin filter wasn't too bad to change. A torch was handy for getting the cover back on. And I nearly lost one of the slidey retainer clippy-things as I didn't realise that these just fall off, if you're carrying the black L-shaped cabin filter cover around.

The old cabin filter looked fairly clean. Which is a good sign of previous maintenance.

The air filter. Whoever designed the air filter on these, should hang their head in shame. It's like they gave the design job to the work-experience child that had never changed an air filter themselves. Every other car I've owned has been a 1 to 5 minute job to change the air filter. Thanks to a clip on filter box lid, with the clips being easily accessible. On the 1.4 TDi the lid is screwed on. From the bottom. With 2 screws in the middle of the lid, coming up from the bottom. So the whole air filter box has to be removed from the car to change the filter!

It would have been simplicity itself to design it so the screws could be removed from the top. Or to use clips instead.

Most of the T20 screw had partially rounded-off heads from previous mechanics. Requiring the use of my son to hold the box whilst I put as much vertical pressure as I could to crack the screws, as well as a spray of penetrating oil.

The fuel filter defeated me. Thanks to the air filter taking longer than expected. As well as me not being able to quickly remove the 2 hoses from the fuel filter. There must be some knack to removing these? I will revisit the fuel filter in a few days.

I also noticed that the old fuel filter hadn't been clipped into place properly. Not a big deal, as it's not going anywhere. But a minor sign of lazy previous mechanicing.

On top of that I discovered that my Launch 919x diagnostics tablet that I bought 3 and half years ago can no longer do service functions, such as resetting the oil change interval or purging the fuel system. It can still read and clear fault codes. I hate paying subscriptions for things like this. So I've ordered a brand new Mucar 829BT tablet (with no subscription and lifetime free updates) from Joybuy for £129.99...

The 4 x filters (all Mann) plus a new sump plug cost me £71.80 from GSF. I used about 3.8 litres of oil from my £105 TripleQX 20 litre cannister of VW 507.