Dammit! Leaving for work this morning and I prod the joystick for the electric mirrors and the poxy thing snaps off! These things happen (and at least it looks like an easy enough thing to pop out & swap over), but in the six month or so of owning this car I've had three out of four air vents fail and now this.

I've driven some fairly shoddy cars in my lifetime, but even they seem to have more resilient switchgear than this! Is this something other people suffer from, or am I just getting too heavy-handed in my old age?

The rest of the car is fine (and being a TDI I'm making a killing on the fuel economy), but it just seems bizarre that the whole car can work so well bar a few flimsy pieces of plastic in the cockpit...

How did the vents fail?

I've always felt the interior plastics/switches in the Octavia are pretty good.

I broke one of the drivers vents the day I bought mine! One of the horizontal 'fins' is facing the wrong way, so you can't really move the others up and down. I read in a Haynes manula that you can gently pries them out, which I'll try soon.

Anyone else had this problem and fixed it?

I've had no "trim issues", but as sole driver I tend to be able to set things and leave them. The main exception being that I turn the centre vents on and off through the thumb-wheel depending on exterior warmth.

The vents worked one minute - the next they didn't (and one was already knackered when I bought the car). I've order a replacement mirror control for £31 from Sparshatts of Chichester after prising out the old control and getting the relevant part number. Apparently there are countless variations of the same switch, so I wonder if this is a recurring issue...