It's never a good idea to leave a stationary car with the engine running and the clutch depressed; it puts significant stress and wear on the clutch release bearing.
What I'd really like to see is the option to manually activate S/S by pressing a button on the steering wheel. Only the driver knows how long the car is likely to be stopped, and whether it's worth cutting the engine.
Having grown up with old cars and carbon thrust clutch release bearings I'm always very careful about sitting with the clutch pedal depressed for longer than is necessary. Edinburgh is a very hilly city, being built on 7 hills, so there are plenty of traffic lights situated on hills and i find myself absolutely cringing at the number of people I come across holding the car, on the hill, on the clutch, until the lights change. Release bearings, being now almost universally of the sealed ball bearing type, can put up with this sort of treatment to a degree but not if you do it all the time. Worth considering too, that the diaphragm spring on a clutch cover plate is a mightily strong spring. You can stand on one and fail to depress it! When you press the clutch pedal down the release bearing pushes against this spring to free up the clutch driven (some call it friction) plate. This diaphragm spring is part of the clutch cover assembly which is bolted to the engine flywheel which is in turn bolted to the end of the crankshaft, So, when you push the clutch pedal down and depress this humongously strong diaphragm spring you are, in effect, trying to push the crankshaft out of the front of the engine! So what stops this happening? In most cases a couple of small, white metaled, thrust washers! So keep your foot off the clutch pedal unless you actually need to free the clutch up to change gear etc. Mr Scott, the old chap who taught all us kids to drive back in the 60s, used to slap you on the upper left leg if he caught you sitting with the pedal depressed without due cause while he was teaching you - on reflection, I wonder if he did that to my sister? That thought never occurred to me before (innocent times back then) This thrust washer thing is one reason why I really don't like that you have to depress the clutch pedal of most modern cars before the starter motor will work. I remember the Triumph 2000 was particularly prone to trust bearing wear, you could push and pull on the front crankshaft pulley and be rewarded by a loud "Clonk" on most of them. When they got really bad the engine would stall when the clutch was depressed because there would be nothing left of the thrust washers and the crankshaft would be trying to mill it's way through the main bearings!
Coming to grips now with the Scala. The stop start is easily and quickly deactivated with a button down just behind the gear lever:
I prefer this placement compared to the Ibiza, which had it higher up on the dash, because it's we orange light doesn't intrude into your field of vision when driving and it's very easy to reach.
The other thing I wanted to be able to do was disable the lane keeping assist. I don't want it permanently disabled because I've had rental vehicles with this feature and quite like it on dual carriageways and motorways but I don't want it in town and on wee country roads. turns out it's really easy to do. The right hand steering wheel spoke has controls built in (as does the left hand spoke in fact) which look like this:
All you do is press that wee sign of the car with circle (top left of control) which brings up a list of 4 options on the wee display between the rev counter and speedo on the main dash. The first thing listed is "Lane Assist" with a wee tick sign in it's box. So you don't even need to navigate to another position, you just select this by pressing the chromed scroll wheel on the steering wheel spoke and it deselects this function. The whole thing, turning off the Stop/start and turning off the Lane assist are done in the blink of an eyelid. Of course it all defaults to "on" next time you start the engine but i'd got used to doing the stop/start on the Ibiza anyway and it's so easy to do on the Scala I'm more than happy with it. If you want you can also do it all using the main infotainment screen but it's a more awkward process so why would you?
By the way, the infotainment system is already asking me to initiate an update and warning me the ignition needs to remain on until the upload is complete - although it then subsequently does the instal whether the ignition is on or not. The garage tells me I need to plan the download for a time when I know my journey time will exceed 15 minutes to be sure of a successful download. Oh deary me, technology? my worst bad dream!
Me too, and an alternator. 
With only 4km on the clock (assuming it had't been fiddled!) it was definitely 'new'. Even given, say, a generous 3-4 months in transit from Poland to Australia that's still 6 months in storage. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the car that anyone could have known about before sale (though it turned out to have leaking clutch pipe) and it was a quite a desirable model (well, I bought it didn't I?
not when its turned off!!!
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