Pick-up, Hot Hatch, Estate... Our Skoda Kodiaq Isn't 'just An Suv'

Deputy road test editor Richard Lane’s long-term Audi SQ5 isn’t big enough to fit a fridge into it, it seems. Happily, however, the Skoda Kodiaq is, and given I had to spend some time in a Vauxhall Mokka and then a Corsa anyway, it was nice for the Kodiaq to prove useful – and for me to get a second opinion on it from another staffer. 

“Absolute Tardis,” Richard reports back after his fridge-related exploits – although I already know it is, as the pictures dotted around here will attest. I have recently loaded the car up for a couple of nights away in a shepherd’s hut; piled it to the roof to take some old flooring and associated rubbish from my youngest’s flat to a recycling centre; and then challenged the length of its interior while collecting a load of shed-building materials, including 2.4-metre-long boarding, from the DIY shop.

The whole cabin isn’t quite long enough for those to the back of the front seats, but if you can utilise the space between them, by loading through and onto the centre armrest, it would take something even longer (that the gearchange selector is on the steering column means you could probably load stuff that’s 2.6 or 2.7 metres long).

I did put a rag on the armrest to prevent the leather/pleather/whatever that’s on it from getting scratched, but there’s quite a lot of sawdust on freshly bought sawmilled feather-edge cladding, so now I’m afraid the car does need a thorough hoovering. 

As Lane says, “not the kinds of job you’d do in a £130,000 Range Rover, for fear of the boot lip and the soft leather”, but I don’t want you to think the Kodiaq doesn’t feel plush in its own right.

And this is a £55,000 car, so it’s hardly utilitarian. But maybe given that it’s a seven-seater, with thickly carpeted seatbacks, and given the way the seats fold flat with one simple pull of a fabric loop, it does give the impression that it’s a more willing holdall than more overtly luxurious cars.

The vRS is, I guess, the least utilitarian of the Kodiaqs, with its big supportive seats. “With red stitching and the bulky contours of the cockpit, it sort of melds the feeling of a pick-up truck with a mid-’90s JDM coupé,” says Lane. “Weird but appealing.”

I hadn’t thought of it like that, but I wouldn’t completely disagree. I suppose if you asked AI to mash up a Honda Integra Type R and a new Ford Ranger you might end up with something not entirely unlike this.

In other mash-up news, Lane says: “It’s billed as an SUV but, seeing it parked on my road, really it’s closer to an estate. Much longer than it is tall. I like this about it.” I think so too.

Skoda still does a popular line of family estates in the form of the Octavia and Superb, of course; it’s one of the last companies standing in that respect. But if you were to think of a ‘traditional’ SUV, the Kodiaq isn’t quite it.

Funnily enough, as I was driving a Vauxhall Mokka for our ‘Mokka versus Cupra Born’ story, the ‘billed as SUV’ thing was on my mind. We frequently read about the rise in SUV popularity, which doesn’t show any sign of abating, but so many of them aren’t strictly SUVs at all.

We have the ‘crossover’ description too, which we tend to use here for sub-SUV SUVs, but in the more mainstream, less specialist press, ‘SUV’ is used as a catch-all for anything a bit taller than a traditional family car.

I’m not ultimately sure that’s helpful when those big, nasty SUVs cop flak in the papers for their size and meanness. The Kodiaq is, really, an easier-to-get-in-and-out-of estate than an Octavia. A bit less efficient, sure, but it is incredibly practical.