Rob,

What are your headlights made from, and is the pattern etched into the glass or the reflective material at the back.

Latter ones are made from high impact plastic with the pattern pressed into the reflective material. Earlier ones glass.

It is possible you have one of the last pre facelift jobbies especially as it was a hire car. Europcar proberbly got a good deal regarding price and skoda uk managed to shift some old stock they had around in the uk.

Hmm...I've never checked what the headlights are made of, I'll have to have a look.

Looking on Butts' parts catalogue, the clusters are <2001 and >2001 - being a

2001 car, it's possible like you say that it's a late pre-. However, it's still badged

and trimmed as an Ambiente, which causes part of the confusion! Unless they

just had a job-lot of old clusters lying around the factory to use up...

And I saw an X-reg with new style clusters yesterday!

Rob.

Looking at the pictures of your car in the gallery I'd say it has the new style headlights, the grille also looks like the 2001> one with the thicker chrome surround.

Is it possible a tail-light cluster was broken at some point and only pre 2001 clusters were available as replacements at that time?

Yeah, that was something that had crossed my mind.

But then I started wondering quite how you damage 1 or

2 rear lights without destroying any of the back end! :eek:

I sent an e-mail to Skoda UK asking them if they had any

ideas how it could happen. I might phone Horners at

some point and ask them too, I just know that having

sold me the car they will assure me it's fine regardless

Rob.

Now have a very polite response back from Skoda UK, telling me that my car

may have been built pre-facelift, but that they couldn't say for sure without

seeing the car.

They suggested a dealer might be able to help me better, and attached a

list of dealers.

I do definitely have the new front lights though. Yesterday I'm sure I spotted

and SG02 reg Octavia with the old style clusters though, but it was late

so I might've been mistaken

Rob.

Rob - take a sleeping pill and stop worrying. The world is full of cars with slight variations from the exact manufacturer's spec for the MY.

If you do change the rear light cluster to one where the bulbs are in a different order, you will run into trouble unless you change the bulb holder as well. And it might just be that the wiring loom to the rear lights is different too. In the final analysis does it really matter what order the rear bulbs are in as long as the rear lighting is legal?

Yeah, if the cluster was changed the holder would need changing

and rewiring too. Not too sure if the loom would be different though -

surely all the same lights are there, just not in the same order?

At the end of the day, I'm not bothered from an aesthetic point of

view, as I spend little time looking at the rear of my car and they are

only light clusters! The only thing that bothers me is if they've

been put in by someone doing a shonky repair job, who selected

the wrong clusters because they didn't really know what they

were doing...

Rob.