Skoda Octavia vRS Review

It started out as ‘practical and exciting’ but more recently, Skoda has added frugal to the list of adjectives. It must be the Octavia vRS - a car that lives up to its TV tagline.

The new Octavia vRS was launched with a 2.0 TFSI petrol engine and was said to be Skoda’s most powerful production car. This 200bhp, turbo-charged, direct-injection unit was, and still is, capable of a 0-62mph sprint time of 7.3 seconds and a top speed of 149mph in hatch form. The estate version takes a little longer (7.5 seconds) for the sprint and the top speed is reduced to 147mph.

It proved popular and was awarded the ‘Best Hot Hatch’ title in the What Car? Awards 2006.

Very good, but what if Skoda could make the car more fuel efficient without compromising too much of the performance? Well, the obvious answer is the Volkswagen Group’s acclaimed TDI PD, diesel unit. Clearly, this was a popular decision as the TDI version accounts for 34.5% of total Octavia vRS sales.

So, now we have the 170bhp, 2.0 TDI PD vRS Octavia with a top speed of 140mph and a 0-62mph time of 8.5 seconds. The fact that this car can be called a ‘hot hatch’ is an illustration of how much diesel engines have improved. Again the estate vRS is a tad slower in the sprint by 0.01 of a second (8.6 seconds) and the top speed is reduced by 1mph to 139mph, which is neither here nor there.

Inherently cleaner and greener than the petrol counterparts, the diesel unit is also fitted with a Diesel Particulate Filter that helps to reduce the amount of nasties coming out of the twin exhaust pipes and the CO2 emissions are measured at 157g/km for both the hatch and estate versions.