Skoda Octavia vRS estate | Shed of the Week

Shed likes a big, powerful load carrier. That was actually one of his main reasons for marrying Mrs Shed. Unfortunately she had other ideas about that so he’s been pretty much carrying the can, or cans when they’re at the supermarket, ever since. Still, a speedy wagon to help him in his dolorous load-lugging duties will always turn Shed’s eye. This week’s sub-£2k with a valid MOT contestant very much ticks that box. It’s a smart example of Skoda’s Octavia vRS estate powered by VAG’s lively (187hp at 5,100-6,000rpm), torquey (207lb ft at 1,800-5,000rpm) and generally well-regarded 2.0 TFSI engine. 

The Octavia estate body added a smidgeon to the hatch’s 0-62mph time but it would still chase that target down in just 7.5 seconds. Not bad for a car that would easily, not to say miraculously for something based on a Golf platform, swallow up five adults plus all their gear and bowl them along the autobahn at 148mph and pull hard from low revs in every gear. You had to put some of that sprightliness down to the gen-two Octavia estate’s weight of 1,415kg, a figure that seems ludicrously low now that we’ve all become accustomed to two-tonne EVs. Eeeh, where did we go wrong, bring on the lightweight batteries, grumble moan etc. 

Our shed has done 129,000 miles, which isn’t a lot for one of these and its Race Blue paint still looks fresh. The most recent MOT test in June came out squeaky clean and the worst advisories you’ll see in the rest of the MOT history will be for worn tyres or suspension bushes. A non-excessive oil leak was noted in 2018 but that hasn’t shown up since. A slightly blowing exhaust first reported in 2019 was put right in 2021. That’s more or less it on the bad news front – if you can reasonably call any of this stuff bad news.

The CO2 is 187g/km. According to the bit of paper (bearing many angry crossing-outs) that’s Blu-Tacked to the side of Shed’s Amstrad, that means an annual vehicle excise duty bill of £385. That’s less than half what it would have been only a little bit further up the VED table. There’s more good news at the pumps with the official mid-30s mpg average being easily bettered on a cruise and hard to get below even when you’re ragging it. Remaps to 250hp were simple and joyful. 

At heart these are good strong cars but possibly as a result of cost-cutting during this era there are a fair few bits that can go wrong, owners reporting porous wheels (not everyone was a big fan of the 18in ones), failed fuel pumps, PCCV valves, ABS sensors and air con condensers/actuators, and draining batteries which probably didn’t do much to fend off various other electrical maladies like forgetful ECUs and satnavs, malfunctioning mirrors and wonky wipers. Some cars exposed to harsher weather such as that typically found in places like Scot Land suffered from body rot, and there was no getting away from the fact that they all chomped through consumables as enthusiastically as Mrs Shed rips through a Sunday carvery. 

As the postmistress will confirm, Shed enjoys a quick delve every now and then. He likes to believe that his investigations into past examples of SOTW-featured cars give us a clue as to how long the one he’s writing about now might last. Of course in reality they do no such thing but he’s getting on a bit so let’s humour him. 

There have been a couple of vRS Octavias on here in the last 18 months. The most recent was another Race Blue car, a 116,000-mile five-door hatch from late 2008 that was whipped off the shelves before Shed’s posted-in copy managed to get online in February of this year. It’s too early to know that particular car’s fate as its MOT doesn’t run out until December, but the black five-door hatch Shed from late 2023 is another story. That was another handsome specimen even with the 155,000 miles that would have been on the clock at around the time of Shed’s write-up. A couple of months after that it was given a clean MOT pass after an initial fail for one over-tired tyre. 

Sadly that was to be its last test. Who knows what happened there, but it’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened where apparently solid high-performance SOTW cars disappear off our roads within a year of them being picked up for buttons. Could it be that people stop valuing nice things when they’re cheap?

A few years back Shed had an open day where you could pitch up at his workshop and have any fault fixed for free. He thought it would create lots more business going forward, but he never did it again because none of those new customers ever came back, which he thought was very ungrateful. The local plod thought there might have been some connection between the zero customer return rate and the mysterious disappearance of some hard to get parts from many of these cars, or perhaps with the fact that none of them were ever seen again in a functioning state, but thanks to some interesting inside info on that bobby that Shed was given by the postmistress no cases were ever brought.