Does the Octy have rear brake pad wear sensors? Mines developed a grinding noise from the rear brakes when applying them for the first 5-6 times on a morning. It goes after this time but its back the next time I drive it. Unfortunately, I was just letting the car tell me when its time for new pads but it just occured that maybe its not monitoring them!

I don't believe so, it is exclusively for the front pads i'm afriad.

I had the same problem on my Mk1 Octavia.

If it's doing it a few times in the morning could it be the rust on the discs being worn off? If you have alloys you can visually check the thickness of the pads through the spokes. Failing that, check for stones trapped in the disc.

How many miles has the car done?

Steel wheels but I suppose I could still take the wheels off and have a look. Its done 26k and had a 2 year inspection 10k ago which included a brakes service (no pads fitted though) so I wasnt expecting any problems. Interesting you say a stone stuck in the brakes as I had a scraping/ringing noise, high pitched, which sounded like something was scraping the disk a few weeks ago. That also went the next day but could suggest an underlying problem there. Maybe I should bite the bullet and get the dealer to take a look.

For the sake of saving a dealer visit I would get the wheels off and take a little look, stones can get caught between the pads and disc as well as the disc and steel heat guard behind it.

As a reference my last Octavia II had done over 40k and the rear pads were fine. The car was always well loaded and driven with great gusto

Does the Octy have rear brake pad wear sensors? Mines developed a grinding noise from the rear brakes when applying them for the first 5-6 times on a morning. It goes after this time but its back the next time I drive it. Unfortunately, I was just letting the car tell me when its time for new pads but it just occured that maybe its not monitoring them!

Mine was doing that for the last few mornings. By coincidence it was already booked in for a service today and guess what - they told me they also replaced the rear brake pads (56K miles).

I also had the that noise but much worse on my previous Octy1 when it had only done about 18K. That turned out to be a seized rear brake caliper on the passenger side. The dealer replaced the caliper plus both rear discs and pads under warranty. They tried to wriggle out of doing it at first by saying that consumable items (like tyres/exhaust/brake pads) wern't covered by the warranty. I argued that the the caliper shouldn't have seized in 18K miles and that the pads/discs only needed replacing because of failure of something that was covered by warranty.

TDI 1.9 DSG box, front pads every 15,000 miles, rear pads 18,000 miles, but then it does over 1000 miles a week nearly all of it around town !!. Warning light is only for fronts and you have at least 3 or 4,000 miles left when it comes on, (bit of black tape over the light for a couple of weeks )