I'll be honest, friends - I'm struggling a little with the Kodiaq I've been running. Not for any bad reason. But when I recently had a Morgan Super 3 and then a 20-year-old BMW 330Ci as my daily drivers, there was always - always - something new occurring to write about.
A new Skoda, though? Gosh, they're just so competent. It's like trying to find new things to say about a kettle.
So on a recent Sunday morning, Father's Day, I woke up at 5am and set off southbound from Oxfordshire to Hampshire, to visit my folks for breakfast and make the most of the longest day. I find the A34 frustrating during peakier hours and the A272 is slower and busier than it was when my dad was cycling 24 miles a day on it into Petersfield and back as an apprentice mechanic in the early 1950s. He says he'd know which cars to expect to meet, and when, during his journey. I doubt that's the case even at 7am on a Sunday these days. But bright and empty, it was the nicest drive I've had in yonks.
When there's nobody around, all cars are at their best, but in the Skoda it is particularly pleasing to run at the pace you want, rather than one dictated by other traffic. I don't in any sense go mad but the vRS does make 262bhp and 295lb ft, and with a broad spread of power and torque it's really nice to flick up and down the shift paddles of its quick-reacting dual-clutch gearbox and finally get into a rhythm and flow with a car that, in daily traffic, I've found not so easy to pin down.
As the fast version in the Kodiaq range, it has some muted aggression about it – big wheels, amplified engine noises, supportive seats and adaptive dampers that can be set to quite firm. Yet it is always a seven-seat SUV that weighs over 1800kg and has the intent to remain comfortable as a daily driver. It doesn't want you to have to make compromises, and while it gets that balance about right, that does mean it's never as plush or as sporty as it could be on either of its edges.
It was really satisfying, then, to find a nice road surface and a good empty road to get it into its semi-relaxed, semi-sporting groove. With the dampers still in a comfy-ish mode, it absorbed the worst bumps and retained decent body control, while the steering is, I think, particularly well judged in terms of speed and weighting. In its demeanour, you could convince yourself you were in a much taller, much heavier, much more easy-to-change-the-interior-temperature Volkswagen Golf GTI.
And it's very useful too. It doesn't need to be to take a bottle of whisky and some biscuits southbound, of course, but while I've collected all of my childhood things from my parents' attic and garage, we seem to have entered a new phase: would I like the wooden tool chest my dad was given on his first day as an apprentice 75 years ago? There are even some tools still in it too. What a treat. Absolutely I would..
I didn't strictly need to put the back seats down but a treasure like that deserves preferential treatment. If a car alone isn't going to provide one with stories, they're always along for the ride.
