Skoda Slavia long term update: What makes it such a great daily driver?

The evo India fleet Skoda Slavia has hit 10k km on the odometer! Big-ish milestone this and its reason enough to pen down some thoughts on what they’ve been like. The Slavia has been a constant in my life for the last eight months. Test cars come and go, but the Slavia has stayed. It has been mainly used on my daily commute in Pune along with the regular Mumbai-Pune runs that come up that are unavoidable in this line of work. It has also joined me on my annual sojourn to Goa in the Christmas-New Year break. Plenty to talk about then! 

We’ve said this right from the first drive reviews — the Skoda Slavia is the benchmark in its class when it comes to driver engagement and thrills. Nearly a year on, that still holds true. Plenty of reasons for it, but fundamentally it is down to two key things: a superb TSI engine and that balanced chassis set up. The engine I have on test is the 1.5 TSI — four-cylinders that deliver 148bhp, 250Nm and plenty of smiles. I’ve got it mated to the manual for one simple reason, I like the added engagement. And consequently a sucker for punishment. The manual is a curse in a city like Pune where our offices are based — even our apex petrolhead Editor looked at me funny when I requested for the manual — because we spend so much time in traffic. But hey, if you’ve got the best enthusiast sub Rs 20 lakh car on test, you’ve got to go full hog no?

I’ll get to the whole thrill-of-driving bit in a second. I want to first talk about how great the Slavia is in the city because I feel that part of its character is largely ignored. Firstly, it is very comfortable. I’m constantly reminded of how good the ride is with how bad Pune’s roads are. The controls are light — maneuvering it is never an effort. It looks striking and that blue paint gives it plenty of presence but in terms of dimensions, it isn’t too wide and so placing it in bad traffic isn’t hard. The engine is refined and the start-stop system is superb. The crawl speed as you let out the clutch takes some getting used to but then you quickly adapt to it. The engine is refined and quiet. There is good adjustability with the driving position and getting comfortable is easy. The sound system is impressive and the dashboard is ergonomically designed. Ground clearance is extremely good and so nothing Pune throws at me fazes the Slavia. This is a car that I look forward to getting behind the wheel of every single day. It’s a car that enjoys being driven with restraint, one that you can just glide around town in and revel in its comfort.

All of that is in addition to the performance it delivers when you drive it hard. The engine delivers performance in spades. And its real world performance — the type that is accessible at all speeds and most revs. Expressway runs are a breeze because I can get up to speed really easily, but the road is so crowded and so riddled with speed cams that sitting with the cruise control engaged at 100kmph is almost mandatory. The car is best enjoyed on a twisty road though, because then you’re revving it out as hard as you can, and rowing up and down the box as the road dictates. Twisty roads also reveal more about its chassis. 

Clarity. That’s the word that comes to mind first when I think of driving the Skoda Slavia hard. There’s a clarity that shines through the chassis that most cars can’t deliver. It tells you what’s going on underneath you and where its limits are very clearly. Handling is enthusiastic, steering is great, understeer isn’t the first thing that comes your way when you chuck it around a bend. The combination of the communication from the chassis and the consistency that it delivers on handling performance means you can drive the Slavia hard should the road permit it. The ghats between Mumbai to Pune are always fun, and driving down Amboli ghat is a particularly memorable one.

It’s based on the same platform as the Kushaq, built on the same production line, feels very similar to drive and an educated guess would tell me that it would score similarly in the crash test. Which means five stars. For both adult and child occupants. That would make it the safest car in its segment and one of the safest cars at that price point. There’s plenty going on in terms of safety — there’s a suite of electronic aids including traction control, ESP and multi collision braking. This top-end variant also features six airbags, TPMS and hill hold control. It also has ISOFIX mounts which make it safer for children in the car. I’m a firm believer that we need safer cars on Indian roads, and something like the Slavia just gives me so much peace of mind. 

There’s another aspect to safety that a lot of people ignore, and that is the driving dynamics. The fact that the Slavia has such sorted dynamics and gives me so much confidence as a driver, makes me safer on the road. I’ve had to make last second avoidance manoeuvres on the Expressway and it is confidence in the car’s ability to do what I want that makes moves like this possible.If I had to second guess how the car would react to an input, I may not have time to finally dial in that input. They say prevention is better than cure and that is exactly what good dynamics do from the lens of safety.

All in all, it has been a great few months with the Skoda Slavia. I like that Skoda found it important enough to build a sedan as their second product on the MQB A0-IN and have done so in a manner that all of the sedan’s traditional compromises have been negated. This is a car that can cover ground as fast (if not faster) than most SUVs out there, and I promise you you’ll have a better time while doing it. Looking forward to the rest of my time with it!