Repeated brake issues on my Kushaq AT & Skoda's failure to resolve them

After keeping the car for 1 week, again they have came up with a solution that master cylinder and brake booster needs to be replaced along with the Master cylinder gasket.

BHPian worldlife83 recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

So a new issue has popped up in Skoda Kushaq and this time this is an equally severe issue like EPC failure as this is related to brake failure. I have purchased Kushaq Ambition AT 1.0 on June 3rd from Garve Skoda Pune, and the car started to cause problems within 500kms for running. Brakes of the car gets suddenly jammed while running and don't get release so the car comes to a sudden stop. This happened 1st when car running was just under 500km, skoda service centre kept the car for few hours and told me that it was due to some brake switch.

Then same issue happened after running the car for 100 more kms, I was with my family, it happened at 9:30pm and for 30mins I tried to connect with RSA but it was busy, tried calling sales advisor, he made a couple of calls but in the end told me that he is not able to help at this time and will connect with me in morning, and all this was happening in Pune city, not sure what would be the scenario where there are no skoda service centres. After waiting for almost an hour, suddenly car brakes got released and I was able to drive the car back to home while.

This time they took it a bit more seriously as I escalated the matter and told me that this will get diagnosed by their technical team. Technical team came up with the reason that it is due to faulty master cylinder and same was replaced and old part was sent to their research team to identify what was the issue. I was ensured that they will share a complete detail of research outcome but looks like it was just a gimmick as no one came back to me with any thing on that issue even after 4 months.

In next 4 months I drove car for around 3k kms and although the irritating brake noise was continuously there which Skoda has conveniently started to called as operational issue, but apart from irritating brake noise in bumper to bumper traffic and on slopes I don't face any other issue. Suddenly the issue reappeared while I was going to drop my kid to school, again in the middle of road without any prior warning of signal of any issue.

After keeping the car for 1 week, again they have came up with a solution that master cylinder and brake booster needs to be replaced along with the Master cylinder gasket. I don't understand how skoda can be so careless and diagnosing the issues and replacing the parts randomly just to get it tested by customers. How can a robust part like brake master cylinder and brake booster fail twice in 4000km of running, these are the parts which usually don't get replaced ever.

This was my 1st and definitely last Skoda, I was one of the person who gave safety a priority although NCAP rating was not out at that time but still it felt more solid then the competition but it is true that safety rating won't help you if your car is ridden with such severe issues like brake failure. Now I am looking to sell this car asap and book a Toyota (hopefully hyryder will get a good safety rating).

For new buyers, that's the only advice that its a fun to drive car but no amount of fun is worth if the car is not reliable, I made a mistake of putting my money in such an unreliable brand when this is my only car. We see issues in other cars and brands as well but just compare the number of units they sell in comparison to skoda to get those number of issues. Failure rate in skoda is just too high.

One good gesture is that after 3rd failure they have immediately provided me loaner car to cary out my day to day duties but I have kept 3 cars in past and I never had to take a loaner car as my cars never went to service station apart from regular serivce.

Here's what BHPian pannags had to say on the matter:

Must be very frustrating. If EPC and AC issues were not irritating enough, we now have something as serious as the braking system malfunctioning.

It's no surprise that despite the fun-to-drive factor and robust safety, response to Skoda/VW cars manage to sell unenviable numbers thanks to reliability issues and the lack of urgency in addressing them.

As a potential buyer, these episodes repose more trust on the more reliable, fuss-free brands we usually don't hesitate to brickbat on the grounds of performance and safety. Can't agree more that, if not more, reliability is at least as important as safety.

In my opinion, you should push hard for a replacement or refund if the issue resurfaces.

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