But can it send a telegram?
Many tech mysteries just waiting to be unravelled.
Keeping up with the Joneses has never interested me much. But that’s clearly not the story at Skoda, where the tech message is: if you want to get ahead of them, you’d better buy an Octavia Estate.
It boasts five USB ports, but not as we know them; these are Type-C ports and, to the ff-C clan, about as much use as an ejector seat in a helicopter. A quick rummage round the homestead unearths three laptops, four diverse mobile phones, two iPads and one much fought-over PlayStation, all serviced by a veritable snake’s kindergarten of cabling universally tipped at one end with a USB Type-A fitting.
Apparently Type-C stuff has been around a while now, and I’m sure there are plenty of thrusting young executives with wafer-thinmint-proportioned laptops who would settle for nothing less. But I know a woman who’ll settle for nothing less than being able to recharge her phone in the car, so the first thing I did on climbing aboard the Octavia was to climb straight out again and buy an adapter. Or four…
Having thus landed the tech Luddite custard pie with some vim, this SE L First Edition Octavia proves altogether kinder, and often rather clever, with the rest of its standard equipment list.
Please welcome, then: an umbrella – Rolls-Royce-style – in the driver’s door; an ice scraper under the fuel filler cap; mobile phone pockets on the front seatbacks; a funnel built into the screenwash tank lid; storage space for the luggage cover under the load-space floor (much to the disappointment of our shed); and four curry hooks built into the side walls of said load space to stave off the world’s biggest emergency slop. The VW Group Virtual Cockpit is endlessly configurable, but the Classic format does the job well. With a digital speed read-out writ large in the middle, it rather negates the £690 optional head-up display, which the missus is only going to switch off anyway.
The infotainment screen is clear, fast and already infuriating. It may boast a touch slider along the bottom that can differentiate between one fingertip and two (volume and map zoom, since you ask), but scrolling through radio stations is fiddly even when stationary, hence destined to be a nightmare on the move.
‘Laura’, the voice-controlled digital assistant, sounds promising. I’ve yet to try her out, but we’re assured she’s bright enough to find me a decent curry in the area, and to differentiate between the driver’s and front passenger’s voices when responding to climate-control commands. Good job too, because the on-screen air-con control layout looks to be something of an intuition trip-hazard in waiting.
So there’s plenty to explore and examine, just as long as everyone can find a USB adapter to plug in their phone.
The infotainment screen is clear, fast and already infuriating
I can’t remember having my hands on any other quick car for so much time and spending so little of it driving quickly.
Odd, really. VW has clearly put some effort into pummelling its SUV undercarriage into sufficient submission to elicit R-appropriate handling alacrity, including winding the T-Roc’s ride height all the way back down to near-hatchback status. A residual whiff of extra bodyroll and pitch cannot be held accountable for this amount of amiable dawdling.
So, given that the driving position is also only fractionally more lofted and upright than that of the nippiest Golf, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s down to presentation. No; not the orange paint. I wouldn’t drive an orange McLaren more slowly... Perhaps don the full Groucho disguise first, but no slower.
Thing is, you just don’t – metaphorically or otherwise – walk out to it of a morning pulling on the string-backs while muttering ‘Right you lot: en garde!’
Don’t get me wrong; amid Mudfordshire’s mithering traffic, having the in-gear oomph to overtake largely at will makes for a heady blend of necessity and joy. And such is the effortless delivery of straight-line pace that the next speed awareness course is never far over the horizon. But when a family-free flail on a sinuous B-road beckons, somehow the flappy paddles always seem to stay un-tugged...
As transgressions go, I don’t think this is up there with shrouding a mint Ferrari 365 GTB/4 in a dust cloth and hiding it under a Swiss mountain in perpetuity, but my reluctance to engage Race mode has left me a tad baffled.
Such musings aside, the T-Roc has been a doddle to live with – the hallmark of any R-badged VW, the continual crunch of road-surface information pushing its way into the cabin the only cruising-speed reminder of the performance potential available.
Though VW does it better than most, I’m not yet entirely sold on the digital cockpit, especially when it expends so much effort merely replicating proper analogue dials. No one (including Lexus) has yet bettered Lexus’s first centre-console touchscreen, with a screen-flanking, button-operated menu and no more than two prods of the screen required thereafter for... well, anything.
I know we’ll miss the T-Roc, though. As Joni Mitchell put it: ‘Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone…’