Skoda Ceo: "we Will Have To Find" An Electric Fabia

Skoda boss Klauz Zellmer says the firm “needs” to launch an electric successor to the Fabia hatchback as an entry-point to the brand in future – but he insisted the project is still in the planning phase.

The current fourth-generation version of the hatchback has been on sale since 2021, with a starting price of around £21,000 in the UK. By way of comparison, the new Epiq crossover is Skoda’s cheapest EV, with prices starting from £24,950.

Speaking to a select group of media, Skoda CEO Klaus Zellmer said the current combustion-powered Fabia, along with the Kamiq crossover and Scala hatchback, would be produced “into the 2030s,” but he added: “At some point in time they’re going to fade out, and, of course, we need replacements for those such as a battery-electric version of the Fabia.”

Zellmer admitted the firm had considered an entry-level electric hatch on the cut-down platform that will be used for the forthcoming production version of the Volkswagen ID Every1 city car, but he noted a decision was made at group level that “VW takes charge of that part of the market, and we purposely stayed out of that because we’re going to cover the combustion part.” 

Zellmer noted the current Fabia was “still in very good demand". He added: "That car needs to be replaced in our portfolio. What will that look like? Will it be at a price point way below €20,000 [£17,200], or a little bit above? We’ve not made any decisions yet.

“But this is an area we need to cover because if you take a brand too far, it’s like a staircase: you enter at a certain level, and if you increase the first step too far you won’t get anybody in your house. This is why we will have to find a battery-electric version of the Fabia.”

Zellmer hinted that a final decision could wait given the ongoing uncertainty over the pace at which the car market switches to electrification. He added: “Something the industry initially probably overestimated was how fast this transformation is going, but so long as we cover a decent size of the market segments with the Fabia and Kamiq, and within the group we have the ID Every1, we’re in a good spot from a group point of view.

“The Fabia, Kamiq and Scala will be in the market until the beginning of the 2030s, maybe even until 2034, then there might be a natural end if the EU keeps 2035 as a deadline [to phase out new non-zero emission cars], and so that is the time window where we will have to come up with a replacement.”

Any future Fabia would inevitably sit on a version of the Volkswagen Group’s MEB platform, or its SSP successor. The firm has just launched the Epiq crossover – a BEV equivalent of the Kamiq – as part of the group’s ‘electric urban car family’ alongside the VW ID Polo and ID Cross and the Cupra Raval. That would be the most natural option for a Fabia EV that was similar in size to the current model, but Skoda could eventually develop a model on a version of the ID 1’s cut-down architecture, making the next-gen Fabia smaller.