Octavia

Used cars enthusiasts have been saying for years that the last honestly made model is always the previous model. Then they don’t have to be so sorry that they don’t have a brand new one. The feverish changes in the automotive industry, however, put the complex cries of the past in a real light.

Third generation Skoda Octavia from 2012 to 2020 is probably the last car whose form and function were determined more by customer wishes than ecological restrictions, safety requirements or homologation deadlines.

They found understanding with us

Current, fourth generation we defended it for a long time, because we are, in the vernacular, “from foch” and we understand the developers how few options they had. That due to the wide range of different equipment and the requirements for the unification of parts, the easiest way to control everything is to put it in the touch screen – in which the richer people will find more functions than the poorer ones. We also understood that without a five-star Euro NCAP rating, some nations would not buy a car at all today, and that if it did not have time to be launched on the market before the end of 2019, it would have to meet more stringent requirements. And they believed that the shortcomings caused by the rushed arrival would somehow be fixed. But it’s been two years and you’re still writing to us that something still doesn’t work, typically Škoda Connect remote access. That because of him you paid extra for independent heating and were really looking forward to playing it via your mobile phone.

Not so much for you

But it also annoys completely ordinary things, such as tuning a standard mechanical chassis. “The shocks and bangs from the front axle are so unbearable that I am considering a complaint. Even on slight bumps, too soft shock absorbers go all the way to the stops.” Jakub Šrámek wrote to us recently. Many others, on the other hand, cannot get used to the heating control in the display, which you cannot feel blindly, or the lane keeping assistant, which turns on again even after a short stop.

“Recently I borrowed the three-wheeler from the service and I must say that it was an incredibly free and relaxing ride. Just start and drive, don’t have to wait for the display to wake up and start hunting for heating in it.” Petr Kopecký wrote to us a month ago. It’s a sad picture of today’s times that Škoda can’t find a single customer who would praise the current Octavia design. And yet it is so, and nothing will be redone, because there is homologation, development costs, and most importantly technology shared with Volkswagen.