I jumped from an Octavia estate to
Cupra Leon PHEV estate and love Cupra. Nice and sedate when you want it to be and an absolute hooligan when you want that too! It's not as simply clever as the Skoda but it is very similar (obviously) in many ways.
As far as I'm aware the flappy paddles will only change gears unless there's been an update for the new facelifted model. The born has flappy paddles to do what you mentioned (no gears so nothing else for them to do!)
You'll spend hours on here - beware! There are a lot of interesting and knowledgeable people on this forum.
Thanks for the welcome to you and the others who posted above.
Which engine do you have in your Cupra? Is it the 1.4 PHEV or the 1.5 PHEV?
I'm looking at the SEAT Leon rather than the Cupra, pretty much purely because the SEAT version is cheaper (a lot cheaper with this month's deals).
It probably won't surprise you to know I'm a member over on Briskoda, and I'm pretty sure someone said on there that with the 1.4 PHEVs, you can hold one of the paddles (I guess a long pull rather than a short pull) and it will kick in more regen.
But armed with that information, I had a test drive at the weekend in a SEAT Leon PHEV with the 1.5 engine. This was a hatchback and I think it was pretty new - I may have been the first punter to drive it.
I only had a short drive and I didn't have much time to figure out all the info on the dashboard, so I may not have got this right, but I think it had the following behaviour...
The car was in Eco mode and Full Electric mode rather than Hybrid (sorry they may not be the correct names for the modes).
So on a dual carriageway I took my foot off the pedals and tried pulling the paddles. When I pulled the left (?) paddle a few times, the dash flashed up "M6", "M5", "M4" etc, and the car was slowing more with each paddle pull. At first I thought the petrol engine was running and it was engine braking, but I then became more sure that the engine was still off, and the M6/M5/M4 were indicating increasing levels of regen (and of course less regen if you went back up to M5/M6 again). A long pull on the right paddle seemed to reset it to auto regen.
I imagine if the petrol engine
had fired up at that point it would also be in those gears, but I'm pretty sure the petrol engine was still off.
So that seems like clever behaviour, and I did like it as it gave you a lot of control.
The downloaded PDF of the SEAT Leon manual from 11 2024 does say that paddles can change regen. (Side note - thank you SEAT for still having downloadable PDF manuals - Skoda are now much worse here as you can read the manuals page by page on a website).
But the manual from 04 2024 doesn't mention this. And the car I'm looking at (which is brand new so I didn't get to drive it) was apparently built in May 2024.
So I don't know whether this paddle/regen behaviour was only just added at the end of last year (how do SEAT model years work?) and a May 2024 car may not have this neat behaviour, or whether it's been there since they swapped over to the 1.5 engines, and the 04 2024 manual didn't describe the car accurately.
Sorry that's a bit of an essay and probably belongs elsewhere.