LIVING WITH A... SKODA SUPERB ESTATE
Fond farewell to big load carrier, which has excited us with its practicality.
IT ’S easy to be seduced by performance, but I’m about to argue here that it is just as easy to get excited by a vehicle that does something else with equal aplomb. In the case of our Skoda Superb Estate, that strength is practicality.
That is why, as our car leaves us after six all-too-brief months, I already know that I’m going to miss it more than any model we’ve recently run on our fleet. It has been, quite simply, a fantastic family car – untroubled by the clutter that tends to come with my three-year-old son, but equally happy on a long motorway run with just me aboard.
I don’t want the Superb to sound like a one-trick pony here. Our choice of powertrain – the 148bhp 2.0-litre diesel with DSG automatic gearbox – didn’t rip up any tree stumps, but it was fast enough when I did manage to find some empty motorways.
It was efficient, too; even regular crawls down the A40 to Auto Express’s central London offices couldn’t shake the average fuel economy to much below 50mpg. Our chosen spec – SE L Executive – is pretty generous, too. You get leather upholstery, Skoda’s range-topping infotainment system – completed with Apple Carplay and Android Auto smartphone connectivity – and dual-zone climate control as standard.
Then there are the simply clever touches – the umbrellas in the front doors, and the Velcro-backed dividers that allowed me to tuck the shopping into a corner of that vast boot and then stop it from rolling around all over the place. The boot light that could be removed and used as an LED torch. And the built-in ice scraper in the fuel filler flap. You get the idea; it impresses you with practical details as much as it does pure capacity.
Still, when you combine the vastness of that load bay (1,950 litres with the seats down, remember) with clever thinking, there really isn’t anything to touch it. I took the car to Belgium for a family holiday in June and was able to load in everything that a week at Centerparcs with a toddler entails. Other staffers borrowed the car for time away and they, too, came away impressed by how comfortable it was, how it could swallow clutter and still feel spacious.
Negatives? I’m nit-picking here but I think the software in charge of the DSG gearbox got confused a little too often, responding to demands for instant acceleration with kickdowns that felt a bit hurried and clumsy.
Build quality felt generally solid but there was a bit of a buzzing resonance from somewhere in the central air vents that got worse on coarse UK motorways. And if I’m being brutally
honest, I’m not sure that plain red was such a good colour choice for the Superb. It definitely looks more sophisticated in metallic shades, particularly silver – although my toddler soon learned the phrase “big red Skoda”, so perhaps I’m being a tad harsh here.
Even so, we’ve tried to make our replacement for the Superb just a teeny bit more glitzy, and so we’ve plumped for the Dragon Green 1.4-litre turbocharged petrol hatchback, in Skoda’s new motorsport-influenced Sportline trim.
It sounds great, but for one small detail: I won’t be running it. My colleague, autoexpress.co.uk site editor Steve Walker, is foaming at the mouth in anticipation. He’s a lucky man.