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-   -   The Definitive discussion. Is a Skoda more expensive to own than the rest? (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/indian-car-scene/29688-definitive-discussion-skoda-more-expensive-own-than-rest-6.html)

Yes but when you pay more for the Elegance then you will recover atleast 60-70% of the extra on the resale.

What ever, Skoda's honey moon period in India is over for sure.
Just as good mileage had helped them earlier to boost the image/sales, maintenance (cost and dealer attitude) are currently pulling them down.

Below snippet is from Economic Times:

An afterthought, the poll should have been "If you have money, would you buy a skoda now?"

Sivadas the reason for the decline can be termed simple - MAGNUM

I think Superb is selling as usual and Laura sales are on the rise, Laura is selling very well but the Octys sales have gone down by a huge number. Case in point is people prefer to buy the Magnum for several reasons.

Well IMO resale here hardly counts, when you are comparing the Octy TDi vs the Civic. Both have pretty good resale value.

Yes, in BLR, it most certainly is.

There is this Octavia Combi L&K that was involved in an accident. Around 20 kmph, rear-ended another car on the outskirts. It turned into a pile-up because the next guy misjudged the braking distance. Rear hatch bent, rear bumper gone, reverse sensors gone, rear wiper gone, front whatever sensors gone, front Xenons gone, front washers gone, front bumper gone, front bonnet gone.

Skoda BLR -- Tafe Access -- quoted one month. It took almost 90 days for the car to come back. Saar, part has naat come, saar. Saar, it is imported, saar. And when it did come, the front bumper and bonnet were still dented and had scratches on them. The paint looked to have been put on by schoolchild with his paintbrush. Needless to say, the owner, who I tried to convince to buy an Elantra or a Civic (anything but a Skoda) is rueing his decision and hates Skoda.

Tafe has been known to give excuses like, Saar car naat washed because current went saar. I mean, you pay a coupla crores for a dealership and you can't buy a generator?

They also refused to give me TD of the car because I walked in in jeans and my backpack. Unfortunately for them, my neighbour picked up the first Superb diesel in BLR, and I insisted on driving it. Stupid gits.

You can cry to the heavens about oil being the only expensive thing they sell, but I'm told their clutch kit costs like 75k. And in the end, even if their cars cost the same as Marutis to service, with the base, low, crap service that they (don't really) offer to their hapless customers, I'd stay far far away from them. After all, a company is accountable for its dealers.

Now of course, there is a new dealership in town. Let's see how that goes, and if Tafe employees starve to death, serves them bloody well right. Stupid gits.

If you want to ask me seriously, Rush, then I agree with whatever Rtech has been saying. That is the real reason I have voted 'no'. Even though I don't own a Skoda. And even though I think 'the rest' is a really elastic description of the competition - encompassing anything from an Alto to a Murci.

The LOLs were to get you guys laughing a bit.

Yes, Skoda is indeed very expensive to maintain, Of the 5 years I have owned that car, did 80,000 kms , did only 5-6000 kms in the last 1.5 years due to niggling problems.
So, I sold it, two months back. Bought Honda Civic.

The niggling problems include, the breaking of alternator belt & taking the alternator pulley with it despite having it regularly getting serviced from authorized workshop & then me paying 10,000 bucks for a lousy pulley & belt replacement.

Once the A/c broke down, reason being, corrosion of A/c cooling coil, and replacement of radiator fan. The fan replacement cost me 10,000 bucks:Shockked: including labour & the cooling coil was about 18 ks plus 7,500 bucks for ac repair & gas filling.

Once the ashtray top(the plastic piece which is pressed to open the ashtray) broke & was quoted a whopping 2500 for replacement.

Bofore I sold it, it was parked in the garage for over a month, when the dealer came to inspect the car, to my surprise, the brakes suddenly stopped working & there was no pressure .I sold the car angrily at watever price I could fetch for it, swearing that I would never buy a Skoda vehicle, nor do I recommend it to any body.

Yes, the Skoda service sucks be it any dealer , the parts are really expensive.
The timing belt change at 60,000 kms along with the service cost me about 31,000( i still don't believe I paid for that) as the workshop insisted that I get all the belts changed along with the timing belt & pulleys.

Yes, It was a good vehicle for the first two years when I bought it, but rear leg room sucks. But I knew that before I bought the car & don't really blame any one for it.

The headlights (as every one knows ) start fading within 1.5-2 yrs time & then the lights are pathetic what with each headlamp replacement costing 13 grand.

I never had any accident with that car, not even a minor dent or scratch,but the side mirrors were stolen twice, replaced by insurance, still costing me 7,500 per replacement as plastic parts have 50% depreciation:Frustrati, but the kind of problems it gave was end less ( which I have not mentioned here).

The bottom line is _____
Buy a Skoda octavia only if you do more than 20,000 kms in a year & then sell it off after 2.5 to 3 yrs or else be prepared.

HOLY MOLY!:Shockked: :Shockked: That's daylight robbery. 30 odd grand for a set of belts?!

Ok, seriously, can someone tell me how much the Octy's clutch assembly costs, from the dealership?

I had inquired for a Clutch replacement for Skoda, even though it never needed one till the day I sold it.

Was quoted about 55,00 from Silvertone Motors, wheres the Dealer in Noida (Autostrada, i guess) had quoted 60K.:Shockked:

I don't know what parts they were claiming to be replaced, but I prefer my OHC or Corolla any day to a Skoda Octavia.

And, v1p3r, the belt replacement charges included a regular service which is about 7.5-8,000 bucks.And the car being delivered after 2 days.

:Shockked:

Why should ac gas filling cost 7.5k? Synthetic oil and all is understandable, but why such a huge amount for this?

My friend was looking to buy a second hand Skoda. A visit to this thread sure will help him decide (Most probably RUN far away from Skoda)

There were a lot of instances when our Accord came back after service with just a 2k (or less) bill. While our neighbour always used to complain about his Octy coming back with 7k (or above) bills.

So to answer the poll, it is YES.

Hey you are supposed to start a thread :mad:

1: Whitefield Honda are just as bad in terms of time to repair especially OHC as parts are kept on order in Delhi. NHC's front end's melt when anything touches them so plenty of them awaiting repair. However, when they eventually complete the job, the quality of repair is good.

2: Be honest - one would only give test drives to people who are actually going to buy the car and these are expensive cars so they need to be picky. A young person in jeans and back pack does not make a convincing statement.

Saddle up guys, this is going to be a long one.

As expected, we have people coming in this thread talking about accident damage and crappy dealers. And I ask again, what are we discussing here? It started off with certain members saying that Skoda India was a company with a bad attitude because they mandate the use of synthetic oil and then do not subsidise its cost. So that makes them a company that is not pro-active.

We then calculated the running costs over the other cars brought up at that time – Accord/Civic. The service costs were higher for the Skoda, but the ownership cost over X number of kilometres was half that of the Civic. Yes, diesel advantage. Granted. But they do finally compete in the same market.

We then went on to say that the Civic is not direct competition for an Octavia TDi. Obviously someone here knows something the free market does not so it is now forbidden for any prospective buyer to compare a diesel with a petrol car, even though they cost the same and are sized approximately the same, because they are not direct competition.

So we compared the running costs of the recently launched Magnum to the Octi Tdi. The Magnum is cheaper to buy and cheaper to service. No doubt about that. Plus it’s a far quicker car than the TDi. So that concludes that. Though some may argue that the Magnum is 2 lakhs cheaper hence is not direct competition to the Octavia! But I guess that’s passable since the criteria for direct competition is not price, but size of the vehicle and the fuel its burns. But then shouldn’t the Mercedes C class also be included? It is the same size and a diesel too! It just happens to be priced a tiny bit higher. How much does a service cost there? :D

We then went on to say that Skoda dealers are the pits. Again, I repeat what I had said about this:
If it’s the dealer service you speak of, then that is an epidemic in India unfortunately as we do not have clear cut laws and regulations to them. It is surely not something unique to any one manufacturer.

GTO says that this is rubbish and ….
So I did a quick search on this very forum. Lets see what popped up:
1. Disgruntled Honda owner asks if dealers are to be trusted after getting a quote on prices:

2. honda dealer problem

3. foul odour in a new Civic. no help from company

4. manson complains-ichibaan honda crappy service

5. montoya-Unhappy with ichibaan

6. Ichibaan tries to palm off damaged Honda to GTO.

7. GTO again - ichibaan does it again. (Seem like they are the TAFE of Honda!

8. Bad service-gurgaon

Honda fan is not impressed as well

10. honda dealer cheating

So. 10 threads started by people who have had bad experiences with Honda dealers.

Lets see how many Skoda threads have been started. Considering the outcry here, I’m sure the number would double that of customer centric Honda:

1. lousy dealership experience – Kolkata (the thread that started all of this)

2. infamous dharna thread

3. TAFE dealer sucks

4. Nummer eins - bad service

5. bad pre-sales experience

6. rs problems – few mentions on dealers within the thread

7. GTO’s take on relatives laura & bad dealer experience.

8. dealer claims rat moved alternator belt!

Strange. It seems there are more Honda owners who feel their dealers are ripping them off. Lets call it even. But even then, surely this is contrary to what GTO mentioned about hearing far more horror stories.

Or maybe it is just that we tend to crucify some more than others. Either ways, like V1p3r says,
I totally agree.

Also this …
sounds very similar to this…
ajmat's post-vtec accident repair time-2 months

Then the topic on localisation came up. Skoda should localise their parts and buy oil in bulk to sell at a cheaper rate to their customers. I agree. I for one would love to buy oil for cheap and genuine spare parts for the same price as parts of a M800.

We have all heard horror stories about the prices of Skoda spares. I personally have had the shock of my life on seeing the bill after my accident. Hell, just the airbags and associated bits along with it cost close to 1.6 lakhs (before insurance ofcourse).

But how much does it cost on say a Civic or Magnum? I don’t know. Probably less. Maybe. However I have yet to see a single Honda or Optra (the few that are here) owner mention what it costs. Ok, most Optra's do not have airbags, so thats understandable. But I remember reading a post on the cost of replacing them on a Swift, and that came to around 1 lakh plus. And that’s a Swift we’re talking about, which probably sells 10 times more than the equivalent Optra/Skoda, and avail the obvious economies of scale on that.

What I do know from members who have posted their experiences is that:
1. Honda charges their customer Rs.16,000 - Rs17,000 for an O2 sensor that costs Rs.2,500 in the open market.
or
2. ac compressor packs up and costs Rs.35,000 to fix
or
3.Rs.16000 charged to remove 2 CD from the HU

So it seems that Honda too like to take their customers for a ride. Similarly there will be stories like this for every single car company out there. It’s just that we choose to focus more on some and less on others.

Then ofcourse we had the standard Skoda lovers get in on the fun with comments like:

To understand the credibility of such statements, we must look back into recent history where this particular member has, on more than one occasion, mentioned how much he prefers the SwiftD to the petrol swift. I mean why would be buy a 68hp diesel when he could have got a better equipped petrol model for the same price, which was freer revving and had more power?

Yes. That is really cheap to maintain. But it’s sad that if you go to sell this car in today’s market, you would be hard pressed to get anything over 4 lakhs for it. So the loss in depreciation and fuel costs over the period of ownership would make this a white elephant.

But then we rarely look beyond the next large payment and conclude that since I have to pay Rs.4000 instead of Rs.10,000, the car must be cheaper to own. Its what you call failing to look at the bigger picture!

So, What can we conclude from this. The purpose of me posting these links was not to start another comparison or to point out Honda etc. It was simply to put a rest to the snowball effect that we are famous for. The facts above are quite clear.

Moral of the Story:
Costs:
Skoda costs more to maintain than the Magnum.
Skoda services cost more than other cars in its segment.
The Magnum and the Octavia tdi costs half that of a Civic/Toyota to run and service over a period of time.
Spare parts are a lottery. Something may be cheaper with one & vice-versa. But yes, ballpark costs considered, the high labour rate of Europe takes its toll on Skoda parts.
The Japanese cars are the most reliable you can buy.
So nothing really new there is it!

Dealers:
Authorised dealerships are out to rip off the public more often than not. This is not exclusive to any particular auto maker. One company may charge 40% more than the market price for oil while another may charge more than 5 times the amount for an O2 sensor. One way or another, these dealerships will find a way to get money out of you. The only foolproof method to prevent this is to educate yourself.

I know that all this will not make the slightest difference to the people who are out to prove a point in any way possible. But, lets just hope that we can atleast give out a more neutral view to others that need genuine advice and not hearsay.

Thats all I have to say on this thread.

Maybe! :)

Baleno was bought pretty much by me. Dad signed the papers in the end. They didn't object to my grubby attire. I've managed to TD both new and used Hondas from Whitefield Honda in the same clothes, and an Optra from those JC Road guys (Garuda?). Advaith Hyundai has actually given me their GM's personal Elantra, and I've driven all their other cars. Same goes for the Swift, SX4, and Innova. Also, I went to Sundaram to enquire about a Merc for Zak, and they treated me with courtesy.

Oh, later their faces turned a curious combination of pale and red when I gave them my parents' business cards for future correspondence. Then they asked me where I live, and that's when I drove the Superb. But the point is, they aren't too smart about customer care.

Ask Vid, I think he's still waiting for his Laura test drive.