You can accuse a reviewer of bias if they give a car 9/10 and everyone else rates it poorly. But most road tests give the Octavia similar marks, and they too are said to be biased.

VAG is the manufacturer that some people love to hate. Some of the opprobrium they have brought on themselves - particularly if the reports are true that they've pushed out Skoda's CEO, Bernhard Maier, because he's made Skodas better than VWs.

Best to take cars as you find them. I had three Octavias in a row and all deserved 9/10.

I purposely sought out one of the last Golf 2018 1.4’s when I bought last year. It was hard to find but the trade was awash with 1.5’s.

AskHJ covered the 1.5 issues regularly but the site’s reviews at the time made no mention until I pointed out the omission. This was corrected right away. Let’s hope the new regime would be just as responsive in a similar situation.

To be fair to the 'All New HJ' site, the report was balanced by saying some owners are still experiencing problems. What WILL be telling is whether any owners / Backroom members are still affected, tell them (HJ site) and whether they run a follow-up article and what it says.

We'll just have to wait and see what transpires.

To me, the issue was as much about VAG's poor customer service than it does engineering quality - inititally (to me at least) denying there even was a problem, then saying it wasn't much of one, then taking a significant amount of time to provide a 'software update' to 'fix' the problem, all the while overhauling the engine (which had only been released the year before) to add a 48V mild hybrid system that also miraculously 'cures' the problem.

I'm getting rather fed up with car manufacturers increasingly shortening the R&D testing phase of their (increasingly complex) new vehicle lineups, using punters as beta testers in order to get some new bit of tech to market first or to reduce costs / to meet some unrealistic emissions deadline from the authorities.

The big picture with the VW group is fairly simple.

They paid out billions in fines and compensation for their leading role in the DieselGate scandal. Then they invested many more billions in their move to electrification. That adds up to many tens of billions, so for several years they have been cutting costs and cutting corners.

It's clear from the reviews of their EVs that they haven't been able to put in enough cash to do the job well. There are glaring signs of underdeveloped software, and of cost-cutting in interior quality.

Those EVs are what VW sees as its future, and they are probably right about that. The fact that they are cost-cutting on their priority projects is a big warning that they are they are going to be economising even more severely elsewhere.

So their ICE cars are the starved poor child of the family. The cash isn't there to fix the problems or to compensate customers for the failures, so the stonewalling is inevitable. Those who put their money into those neglected products are walking into trouble.

Edited by NowWheels on 12/08/2021 at 22:09