If your priorities in a car are space and value, few mid-size hatchback or estate cars offer a better combination than the Skoda Octavia. It has a huge amount of passenger and boot space compared with most rivals and is available with a large range of engines that all give you excellent fuel economy. It’s also very comfortable, keenly priced and feels like it’ll last a long time.
The current Skoda Octavia was introduced in 2020 – the fourth generation since the model made its debut in 1998. The Octavia has always offered a lot of space for a mid-size hatchback or estate, and has always been very competitively priced.
The current Octavia is available with petrol, diesel or plug-in hybrid (PHEV) power and manual or automatic gearboxes. Some models have four-wheel drive. There’s a broad spread of trim levels available, including the high-performance vRS.
The previous-generation Octavia, sold from 2012 to 2020, offers you largely the same options, though it’s not available with PHEV power and there’s a version of the estate called the Octavia Scout that has a higher ride height and some SUV-style design features.
Every trim level available for the latest Octavia comes with a 10-inch touchscreen infotainment system supporting Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, DAB radio, Bluetooth, two-zone air con, cruise control and rear parking sensors. Many models also have sat nav, a digital driver’s display and front parking sensors. Older generations of Octavia have broadly the same features.
According to official figures, the latest Octavia can give average fuel economy of 36mpg to 56mpg with a petrol engine, 45mpg to 68mpg with a diesel or 176mpg to 282mpg with PHEV power. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are 117g/km to 181g/km for the petrol engines, 109g/km to 162g/km for the diesels and 22g/km to 36g/km for the PHEV. Those numbers apply to the Octavia Hatchback (estate models are a little less efficient).
Petrol and diesel models of the previous-generation Octavia give similar fuel economy and CO2 emissions figures.
Other mid-size cars worth considering include the Ford Focus, the Peugeot 308 and the Vauxhall Astra. The Octavia offers more boot space than any of those and is particularly good value for money.
One of the Octavia’s biggest selling points is the sheer amount of passenger and boot space it gives you. The room in the back of any Octavia is really impressive: Four particularly tall adults can travel together comfortably in the car and children will feel like they’re in the back of a limousine.
The boot is enormous. The latest Octavia Hatchback has 600 litres of space – enough for most families to pack in everything they need for a week-long holiday without removing the parcel shelf. The back seats fold down if you need 1,555 litres of space for tip runs or flat-pack furniture shopping. If the Hatchback isn’t practical enough, there’s the Octavia Estate. Its boot has a capacity of 640 litres, or 1,700 litres with the back seats folded down. It’s also easier to load because it has a bigger opening. Older Octavias have only-slightly smaller boots.
The latest Octavia was awarded a full five-star safety rating by safety experts Euro NCAP. It provides a very high level of protection in a crash for both adult and child occupants and is fitted with many advanced driver-safety features. These include Turn Assist, which warns you of on-coming traffic when turning left out of a junction, and Exit Warning, which alerts you if you’re about to open the door into the path of a vehicle or cyclist. Previous generations of Octavia also achieved five-star ratings from Euro NCAP.
The current Octavia is available with plug-in hybrid power – the model is known as the Octavia iV. It has a 1.4-litre petrol engine and an electric motor that can drive the car separately or together, depending on the circumstances. According to official figures, it has a 35-mile range on battery power alone. The high-performance Octavia iV vRS has extra power for quicker acceleration, but it’s slightly less fuel-efficient.
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