SKODA OCTAVIA VRS
Our experiment is at an end and we can now reveal which VRS cocktail tastes best
WHY WE RAN IT
It’s a quick family car for real-world use, but estate or saloon, diesel or petrol, manual or dual-clutch, 4WD or FWD?
The thing about a car like the Skoda Octavia VRS 245 is that you don’t realise how much you like having it around until it has gone. It is exactly the sort of car that slots easily into your life, ticking off every one of your mundane motoring tasks without any fuss whatsoever. What’s more, it does it all without ever getting on your nerves. That probably seems like a low bar to set for a modern car, but experience tells me there aren’t very many out there that get it right.
With KU18 ZKA no longer in my care, it is only now that I will begin to appreciate it. It has been faultlessly reliable, spacious, practical, quick and more than decent to drive along a twisty road, and it has made a very fine photoshoot support vehicle on more than one occasion too. However, as I have said more times than anybody would care to count, this particular car was not specified with Dynamic Chassis Control, an £860 option that irons out the slightly too tough and unyielding ride quality.
It was back in May when this white, petrol-powered, front-wheeldrive, manual estate took the place of my previous Octavia VRS, which was a blue, diesel-powered, fourwheel-drive, DSG hatchback. If I was cherry-picking, my ideal VRS would be an estate (having spent a few months with one, I’ve come to appreciate not only its versatility, but also the way the car looks) and it would be a subtler colour than either Moon White or Race Blue. Perhaps a f lat grey, or even black. I would specify the DSG dual-clutch automatic gearbox, because although the manual is very good, I just think the paddleshifter suits the car’s effortless all-rounder character a little better. Four-wheel drive I could do without and, given a choice between the petrol and diesel engines, I’d choose the more powerful, revvier, more responsive and far and away more satisfying petrol lump.
Having said that, one of the main reasons for swapping cars halfway through the loan period was to run an in-depth comparison of the two fuel types. My personal preference for petrol is all well and good, but if it turns out that the diesel is far cheaper to run, I will have to concede the point. I’ve already compared the cost of fuelling each
The petrol VRS is the one to go for, unless you cover a huge number of miles
car, but it’s worth quickly running through the data again now that the test is actually over.
In three months, I covered 2915 miles in the diesel car and, during the following five months, I drove 6494 miles in the petrol car. Over the course of each test, the diesel averaged 44mpg and the petrol 34mpg. It should be said that at no point in either car did I drive with a view to wringing a few more miles out of a tank. I simply got on with it. Using the latest average UK fuel prices, that means the diesel will cost £139 to fuel over 1000 miles and the petrol £174. Assuming you drove 15,000 miles per year, the diesel would cost £2085 in fuel and the petrol £2610, a difference of £525 in favour of the diesel version. That’s £44 every month.
If you pay for your own fuel, that might be significant enough to be a factor. It certainly would be if you rack up a much higher than average number of miles each year. Drive 30,000 miles, for instance, and the difference in fuel cost would be more than £1000 a year.
What about purchasing costs? I’ve run a few lease quotes to get some idea of how the two models compare. A diesel VRS in the spec I’ve outlined above (estate body, front-wheel drive, DSG) will cost around £286 each month before VAT. That’s on a 36-month lease agreement with three months down and a generous limit of 15,000 miles per year. On the same terms, the petrol car will cost… exactly the same amount.
So there you are. I think we can reasonably conclude that the petrol VRS is the one to go for, unless you cover a huge number of miles, in which case the diesel begins to make more sense. The elephant in the room, of course, is that as the war on diesel continues and more drivers turn their backs on it, such cars might well become more expensive to run. The cost of the fuel itself could creep up and the government might well impose punitive tax increases to dissuade us from choosing diesel cars over petrol ones. The consequence here is that overall CO2 emissions would gradually creep up because petrol cars emit more of the stuff.
Next time you are hacking along one of Britain’s busy motorways, keep an eye out for Octavia vrss like this one. I seem to see a small handful of them on every long journey, which suggests to me that plenty of other drivers in the UK find its combination of practicality, performance, comfort and affordability every bit as compelling as I do. It hasn’t been the fastest or the most exciting car I have ever had the privilege of running, but in terms of fitness for purpose, I do honestly believe it has been one of the best.