I bought an Octavia estate last year just before lock down and was pleased to own the newest and nicest car I ever had. it had all the mod cons including an automatic stop-start system, which I am sure you all know about.

After a while I had a number of issues with it, and the car generally. I took it to the approved dealer and they said there were no fault codes.

The problems included:

occasional high rpm before gear change (it's automatic)

start stop would not cut the engine due to high energy usage, even though nothing was obviously running

sometimes the engine would really struggle to start

one time the display showed a stop start error but mostly it was just strange behaviour.

Well it seems like it was related to a low battery, probably caused by lots of short journies during lockdown. The last time I took it to the garage, it wouldn't start again! I bought a small charger from Amazon for 30 quid and as soon as I connected it, it showed a very low battery so I left it to fully charge.

Next time I went out, the car started easily, the stop start cut within a few minutes when I stopped despite the air con running. it all looks like it might be good.

However, for an unreliable component like a battery, why on earth wouldn't the car detect the low voltage and show the error on the dashboard? I have already paid the garage 60 quid originally to try and fault find when a charger might have been the only problem!