Taxi Driver Online

I've had this car for about 3-4 months now and love it.

It has loads of gadgets I love, but I absolutely hate the automatic safety braking.

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IDFIMH

Nice

Would have been my preferred vehicle last time round, except for the fact that I left it to the last minute (as usual) and couldn't source one quickly enough. Not to mention that with St Andrews soon to be named Speedbump City, and the perennial taxi rank chaos meaning damage to the car is a lot more of a worry than it should be, in a way I'm glad I got the smaller and cheaper Octavia saloon.

But it's also the mild hybrid TSI DSG, although a slightly older model and only the 1.0 engine. But in terms of the basic engine, power train etc, probably very similar to yours.

I do like it though, although everything's that much snugger than my old Passat estate in terms of space. But it took me ages to get used to it, and a lot of the tech and gadgetry just spoils it too much, in my opinion.

Could chunter on for hours about it all, but, you know...

Not sure what you mean by the automatic safety braking, precisely, though. I've got that, although maybe not quite the same thing, and it's never activated in normal driving, although very occasionally it makes a loud beeping sound if if there's traffic up front suddenly at a halt, for example, and I'm coming up to it fairly closely, and reasonably quickly.

Although it's never actually applied the brakes - just given a loud audible warning

Only caveat to that is that on a very small number of occasions the brakes have come on very suddenly and fiercely when I've been reversing at very, very low speed while manoeuvring around the back of the rank mess. Which has made me jump, and wonder what's wrong, and thinking there's a fault with the car.

Not sure precisely what's happened, but I'm guessing the reversing sensors have very suddenly detected something other than via the normal reversing beeps (or they think they've detected something) and applied the brakes automatically. Which even at 3mph or so just feels way over the top

You can turn the auto brake protection off, but it comes back on when you start again. Which doesn’t help in the stop/start taxi/PH trade.

It doesn’t kick in often, maybe 6 times since I got the car, but it’s horrible when it does. Usually when you are going around a corner and some numpty pretends to cross. Car brakes and blows the horn and you are left looking like a prise Pratt behind the wheel.

As for reversing it’s even worse.

But at least I have got my umbrella in the door.

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IDFIMH

That certainly sounds a tad more full on than mine.

Maybe it just hasn't happened yet but, as I said, driving forward at least it just beeps loudly and something flashes up on the display, and disappears again quickly. It hasn't actually braked the car yet, and no horn peeping, so maybe any collision just hasn't been imminent enough for it to actually apply the brakes, but presumably it would in more urgent circumstances (as it is, I can go weeks without actually hearing the loud beep at all).

But the first few times it happened even the beep made me jump a bit. Reminds me of when I got the Passat in 2014 and it was the first car I had with stop-start. So I'd be sitting stationary for ten minutes on the rank in total silence, and suddenly the car would start automatically.

And make me jump

Gradually got used to that, as I'm getting used to the loud emergency braking beep on the Octavia (but without the actual braking. Yet.).

(But, as per earlier, the reversing thing in the Octavia is a whole different ball game, and does panic me a bit. Particuarly because I couldn't work out why it happened. And that's partly because it's all over so quickly it's not at all obvious what's actually happened to cause the sudden and savage braking )