Shed of the Week: Skoda Octavia vRS

I'm sorry sir, but someone's stuck a Skoda badge on your Shed...

You don't see many rusty cars these days. They're still around, of course, and quite a few of them appear in this column each week, but modern carmakers have learnt the trick of hiding corrosion; it's now most commonly found (or not found) in those poor quality parts that manufacturers have deemed unimportant enough to be good targets for money-saving. You know, things like steering and suspension components and brake pipes, or unprotected structural areas snidely concealed behind painted bodykits or 'underbody protectors'.

Please excuse Shed's cynicism. This dates back to a time when visibly rusty motors were in the majority, their incontinently brown sills signalling a primal homing instinct to return to the earth. Ashes to ashes, rust to rust.

Point being, when you see rust in unexpected and depressingly visible places, like the tailgate, on relatively modern cars like this Octavia vRS estate, it comes as something of a shock.

Pundits have described the vRS as a hard car to get excited about, a car to be respected rather than revered. The vendor of this vRS, however, describes it as by far the best car he has ever owned. Shed takes the seller's view, recalling with some fondness a stupidly fast splash through a streamingly wet Lake District in a vRS hatch. These are quick, capable and extremely useful vehicles, especially in estate form, although the hatch is ridiculously roomy too.

This particular car has taken a hefty biff to the sill. Normally, a dent in this area will be ignored by MOT inspectors. They tend to be more interested in holes (as per above) but there's no sign of the brown stuff here so you should be reet.

Quality wise, you can expect a good experience with an Octavia. When the Czech marque came up for corporate absorption in 1991, Volkswagen beat Renault to the punch by promising to lift Skoda's output up to somewhere near the level of their existing VAG products, whereas the Frenchies saw it more as a budget sub-brand that would prop up and broaden La Régie's appeal.

Renault filled its range gap in 1999 by acquiring the Romanian brand Dacia. VW, meanwhile, has been pretty true to its word. When this 2003 car was new, the Octavia came third out of 137 cars in a major survey. In 2004, Skoda finished second in the JD Power Customer Satisfaction bunfight.

Fifteen years down the line, you'll be into the usual trials and tribulations involved in running any used car. Specific to this 20-valve 1.8 turbo engine, the air mass sensors and turbo dump valves go west, as do the notoriously nasty plastic water pump impellers that ruined many a VW group car at the time. Coils - goes without saying. If you decide to take this car on you'll want to see evidence of timely belt/pump changes (every 60k, Shed thinks), and then keep them up while you own it.

Although the current owner has given us a nice list of works carried out on his watch, the history previous to him is unknown. The car has clearly earned its stripes, and the owner is refreshingly transparent about its foibles and drawbacks. But Shed reckons there's still plenty of life in the old dog yet.

Talking of which, if the vRS estate was put together using a lot of the same bits and design tropes used on the Mk4 Golf, you can bet your wellies that the rear screenwash pipe will regularly drop off. Symptoms of this include an obstinately filthy screen despite your increasingly insistent heaves on the screenwash stalk, and a puzzled-looking dog that shakes itself on getting out even though it was dry on the walk. Hercule Poirot might make some sort connection between this and the rust on the tailgate. We couldn't possibly comment.

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gforceg

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