Having previously taken a van to France on booze cruise duties, I realised that a big estate car would have probably also done the job. To test this theory I booked one of the biggest of the lot, the Skoda Superb, which with the back seats dropped has 1,865 litres of space.
It doesn’t take much time inside the Superb to realise why owners like it so much (it was voted the second best car to own in an Auto Express survey of 29,000 motorists). There’s nothing flash about this car, but there’s a real sense of class in the way it goes about its business. Its interior has an understated simplicity, with logically placed switches and quality that is a match for anything this side of an Audi, while sitting in the back and marvelling at just how much legroom there is still ranks as one of motoring’s greatest surprises.
Not quite such a nice surprise is to find that in order to jump on the eco bandwagon, Skoda offers this enormous car with a 1.6-litre turbodiesel engine. With just 105bhp and 184lb ft of torque it struggles with anything other than an empty load, and you must work it so hard to get any meaningful performance that economy hovers in the mid-fifties rather than the claimed 64.2mpg. Better to spend £340 extra and get the 2.0-litre TDI, which has enough extra torque to also return 50mpg while not making you drive like there’s a baby polar bear lodged under the throttle pedal.
The real treat is that, even in 2.0 TDI guise, Skoda can produce such a vast, well-built car for just £20,480. Given the size of the thing and the quality of engineering on show, it really is astonishing.
Article source: www.telegraph.co.uk