Will our latest arrival give us what we expect from a driver’s car, an EV and a Skoda?
We’re not convinced our EV deserves its vRS badges. Does a top engineer agree? - 22 March
Take our Skoda Enyaq iV vRS. I queried in its first report as to how sporty it was going to be, and after a few thousand miles of driving, I’m still not sure. Here at Autocar, we love the standard Enyaq , but the vRS hasn’t lit my fire in the way I had hoped. It feels like a badging exercise dreamed up by marketing, rather than something with a rock-solid engineering base.But that’s the critic in me talking.
“Fundamentally, you need to look at it in three ways: brand, type of car and class of car.” All of them are vital to Pook, because with the combination of Skoda, electric SUV and sporty vRS badging, you should know before you approach this Enyaq how it’s going to drive. “It has a firm handshake, if you like, saying ‘I’m a sporty car with sporty pretensions’,” he says. “So you start to build up a mental picture of what you’re going to get back from that. Does the firm ride mean responsive and precise steering? Or handling and agility?Pook, as you would expect, has hit the nail on the head straight away. Maybe it’s the way my brain is wired, but the ride quality always hits me first in a car, followed by other elements like the steering response and handling.
But still, it’s not getting under my skin like a vRS should. From reading the promotional material for the Enyaq, it’s clear that Skoda was going for the design heritage of the badge first, followed by the power and handling ancestry second. In that it’s definitely succeeded, because the car collects compliments wherever we go. But I worry that the brand doesn’t have long before vRS no longer stands for what it always has – and that would be a shame.
We’ve also had some shockingly low-efficiency runs, dipping as far as 1.3mpkWh, translating to 100 miles of range. It was the worst possible scenario – a set of short journeys, a freezing cold day, no cabin pre-conditioning – but even so, that’s a properly frightening number.
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