WHEN you consider you’ll spend something like three years of your life in a car it makes sense to do the homework before you write the cheque.
And if you’re looking for something that really does the business, then Skoda could have the car for you with the appropriately named Superb Estate SE Business.
A car thus named because you could just about run a small business from its capacious interior.
Check out this Czech limo and you’ll find it’s everything an estate car should be, majoring on the vast load area side of the equation before racking up the brownie points on the user-friendly, economy and comfort stakes.
There’s so much room inside that a colleague quipped ‘one really ought to be a member of the landed gentry to own one’, such is the amount of space you inherit when you part with your money.
Your own four wheeled piece of real estate it certainly is, and it comes lavishly equipped so that everyone travels in comfort, especiallly those in the rear where the legroom really is in the limo class.
‘Sit back and enjoy the ride’ has never been a more apt phrase in a car that retails for silly money, when you consider what you get along with your V5 document and a year’s road tax. The Superb estate SE Business Greenline III will set you back a modest £21,905. Our test car here had the obligatory couple of options like intelligent park assist, an electrically operated boot and heated front seats (if you’ve never tried them you won’t appreciate how they can improve a frosty early morning run) and still came in at under £24k.
For your money you get a heck of a lot of car and the Superb is just one of a range of cars gaining an enhanced reputation under the protective wing of the VW Group. The brand has been in the top five of the prestigious JD Power customer satisfaction survey for more years than I can remember – not many manufacturers can say that on their CV.
It looks long and when you come to park it you find out your initial impression wasn’t too far wide of the mark, so the park sensors earn their inclusion on the specification with the model tested here.
But while it looks big it has a certain elegance about its shape, set off by decent sized alloy wheels that don’t hamper the ride quality and a rear end that curves gracefully down to the bumper.
It’s billed as the largest and most luxurious car to ever wear the Skoda badge, and to my mind it’s one of the best. Well worth an hour of anyone’s time to give it a good once over.
Anyone who’s a fan of diesel engines will love the modest 1.6 litre unit in this car. It pours out a decent amount of torque to allow you to accelerate swiftly and, more importantly, overtake safely.
Quite how such a relatively small engine moves such a decent sized car around so efficiently could seem a bit of a mystery, but the attributes of the VW Group 105ps TDI engine are well documented. Decent pace plus excellent efficiency.
With the estate you get some neat, added value, user friendly touches, like the luggage compartment lighting; a handy LED light that illuminates the luggage area but which can also be used as a torch (you might need it to find the rear of the vast load area); and that must have accessory for the British motorist, a collapsible umbrella stowed in the rear door.
There’s no escaping the pride Skoda feel in their range topper, but is calling it ‘Superb’ gliding the lilly a bit?
There again you couldn’t call it the Skoda Not-half-bad-at-all-you-know, which would have got the message across probably just as well but wouldn’t have fitted too well on the bootlid.
So, Superb it is. And it lives up to it better than you might expect.
FASTFACTS: Skoda Superb Estate SE Business Greenline III; £21,905; 1598cc TDI, 105ps, 250Nm; six speed manual; top speed 119mph, 0-62mph 12.2secs; fuel (60 litre tank) – urban 53.3, extra urban 68.9, combined 61.4; CO2 119g/km; will it fit the garage (might be a squeeze) – 4833/1817/1511 (l/w/h).
© wheelwrite 2015