Skoda Octavia VRS Estate
No room left in the boot
WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT
To explore breadth of oil-burners and how Octavia stacks up as a family car
My long-standing theory: you spend according to your means. If you earn more, you spend more. And the same is true of boot sizes, I reckon. Whatever the size of your boot, you fill it if you’re going anywhere overnight. And so it was that I managed, really quite easily, to fill the gargantuan Octavia VRS Estate’s boot on our first weekend break away since lockdown lifted. As a reminder, it has 600 litres; the Mercedes-maybach S-class has 540 litres, the Bentley Flying Spur 420.
The hooks and pockets to either side may be simple, but they shouldn’t be underestimated. A bag of dirty wellies can hang off each, meaning there’s no chance of them tipping over and spilling dried mud all over the boot f loor.
Once I had packed the car to the brim, we were ready for a drive to the south coast, having almost forgotten what the sea looked like after about a year of outer-london life.
Having spent a few months with the Skoda now, I’m fairly au fait with all its systems – and when they work, they work beautifully. That’s the case more often than not, but there are a few blips. Sometimes the Apple Carplay icon doesn’t appear on the screen, sometimes the infotainment doesn’t load (and says something like ‘Finding settings’ but then fails to find them for the journey’s entirety) and changing the climate controls remains deeply frustrating on the touchscreen. I get the occasional sensor error, which soon rectifies itself, and I’m still baffled by an occasional ‘pop-pop’ from the speakers at random times (seemingly no one else on the entire internet has had the same problem).
They’re the niggles, but broadly speaking, the set-up is great, as it was for our trip to Chichester: I hopped in the car, put a route into my phone and it appeared almost instantaneously on the car’s screen.
The first leg of the journey was motorway, including that particularly jarring asphalt on the M25 just south of the junction with the M3, which demonstrated the vrs’s excellent sound insulation. Sometimes in performance-oriented cars like this with stiffer springs and lower-profile tyres, you get considerable noise and vibration into the cabin, but the VRS does a great job of isolating it.
The ride, be it on the motorway or the more rural roads nearer our destination, proved to be really good, too. You can feel that it’s firm but only with experience of a standard Octavia would you say that it is conspicuously so. In fact, the only time I really became aware of it was over the harshest of speed bumps.
As we came off the motorway and started to meander towards the coast, the relative compactness of the car’s proportions made windy rural lanes easy to manoeuvre when oncoming traffic was in play, while the handling around corners broke up the monotony of the journey and, well, of life as we currently know it.
Three days, plenty of walks and a trip to the beach later, I arrived back home no less convinced by the car than when I started. Then it was time to start removing the sand…