Skoda’s brilliant Yeti is our reigning 4x4 of the Year, but all-wheel drive is becoming ever-more significant throughout the rest of the company’s range too. Whether you’re after a small family car that can climb a wet hillside or a titanic estate that won’t sink at the first sign of ice and snow, the resurgent Czech manufacturer has no end of vehicles ready to be your best friend in the world.
There’s a sharp lip at the side of the track, the kind that lifts a rear wheel off the ground as you turn across it. On the downhill side, the ground drops away steeply enough that from the driver’s seat, you can’t actually see it. Once committed, there are no ruts to keep you straight. And it’s wet. This is the kind of terrain that makes you think twice if you’re in a Jeep or Landy on mud-terrains. But we’re in a Skoda. Not even a Skoda Yeti, either, the SUV that recently won TOR’s 4x4 of the Year award. Our companion for what promises to be a butt-pucker of a ride is an Octavia Scout – in showroom trim, all the way down to its tyres.
The hill, and many others like it, was part of the Can Pedro test centre near Barcelona where Skoda assembled a cross-section of its burgeoning 4x4 product line for freeloaders like us to try out. As well as the Yeti and Scout, various examples of the Superb were strutting their stuff, as was the Octavia 4x4 – the latest version of the first Skoda to gain all-wheel drive since the company’s dramatic rebirth as part of the Volkswagen group.
This new generation of Skoda 4x4s strays well out of off-roader territory and into the whole squalid world of mere cars, but it does so with technology which delivers quite extraordinary amounts of traction. There are tremendously safe vehicles as a result – and, when it’s combined with a suitable body shape and some decent ground clearance, the Haldex 4 coupling and its associated electronic traction aids allow them to do remarkable things off-road.
The Superb, which is like a Volkswagen Passat only bigger, doesn’t have that shape or clearance. Neither does the Octavia, though its Golf underpinnings mean it’s at least a little more agile away from tarmac. Both deliver tremendous stickability on gravel or roughly surfaced tracks, but for obvious reasons the main benefit of four-wheel drive here comes when you’re confronted with a wet or icy road.
The Scout, on the other hand, is basically an Octavia 4x4 Estate with lifted suspension, bigger tyres and a couple of underbody bash plates. It’s not a full-house off-roader by any means, but it’s been optimised for off-tarmac use and the effects are very evident. It’ll pick its way over decent sized axle twisters without grounding, and the Haldex system’s tractability, and in particular its instant responses to changing ground conditions, make the vehicle something of a point-and-squirt ground-crosser.
Now in its fourth evolution, the Haldex clutch splits power between the axles with 96% going to the front wheels under normal driving conditions. This climbs to 100% at motorway speeds, while as much as 90% can be sent to the back if the front wheels are struggling for traction. In addition, a traction control system operating across the front and rear diffs can send up to 85% of the engine’s effort to one wheel if it’s the only one capable of finding grip.
Similarly, if one wheel starts to spin, it’ll be braked while drive goes to the other three. There’s nothing unheard-of in any of these concepts, but in practice the system works very smoothly indeed to keep the Scout moving on terrain that really should be beyond it. You don’t feel the brakes intervening, either, which is a step forward from some of the earlier Haldex drivetrains we’ve experienced on other VW Group products.
What this means, of course, is that the Scout is capable of being driven into situations in which the laws of nature and its limited ground clearance take over. Yes, it’s very easy to drive in almost absurdly difficult situations, but you do need to keep your brain engaged to avoid doing something that’s going to damage the vehicle. The Scout doesn’t have any kind of low-box alternatives, but if you want a Skoda for that kind of off-road use it’s the Yeti you’ll be after.
With more ground clearance and much better approach, departure and breakover angles, this is better set from the word go; add in the various driver assistance functions that come in when you press the vehicle’s off-road button, and you’ve got a vehicle which can twist axles alongside anything in its class. Ultimately, we’re not sure it would quite match the Freelander or X-Trail in a mud-plugging contest, but that’s pretty academic anyway.
Our test drive programme saw us tackle a short trial-style course in a Yeti before taking the vehicle on what could best be described as a mini randonnée in the hills. This culminated in a series of climbs and drops on the hillside where this story started; at this stage, we had no idea we’d be returning in a convoy of Scouts, and the terrain seemed like a tall order even for the Yeti.
Shod with winter tyres, the vehicles were worked pretty hard by these hills. We got the chance to swap between manual and semi-auto gearboxes; without low range, it was first gear all the way, but what was noticeable was that the auto performed much more effectively on steep, slippery climbs when we put it in manual mode. Left to its own devices, it became hesitant, making it touch and go whether we were going to maintain enough momentum to make it to the top, but with the selector in first it knew exactly what to do.
Coming back down again, too, we found that while the electronic aids at our disposal can make a huge difference in some situations, the lack of grip on the biggest hill meant it was actually better to leave it switched off. We didn’t try that in the auto, obviously, because even with a big run-off area at the bottom there are limits to just how dumb you want to risk playing it, but with the manual box in first and a light covering of the brake to try and stop it running away in the first place it was possible to keep the tobogganing to a minimum.
That of course was the only way to do it when we returned a few minutes later behind the wheel of a Scout. This time, we didn’t even have winter tyres to try and bite into the ground, and sure enough there were some hair-raising moments on the way down. None more so than for an Italian chap who tried it just after us and made the mistake of trying to brake and steer at the same time, with predictably sideways results.
What this shows is that even with idiotproof technology that promises to do it all for you, learning the basic techniques of offroading and understanding when and when not to apply the hardware at your disposal is always a good thing. It also shows that while smart gadgets certainly can help – without them, indeed, vehicles like the Yeti couldn’t exist in any meaningful form – they’re not always the answer.
As we said in our 4x4 of the Year supplement, the Yeti’s victory wasn’t about off-roading. It was down to all-round practicality, good design, value for money, equipment levels and SUV appeal, along with a strong showing on a primarily tarmac-based test route. To be honest, what we did at Can Pedro was ten times more challenging to the vehicle’s off-road systems; the result was to convince us more soundly than ever that the right vehicle had won.
Off-roading isn’t always about hitting the extremes (in fact, in the real world it rarely ever is), but by its own standards the Yeti clearly does have the capacity to do it. Like most modern SUVs, it places a reliance on electronics that means its skills are most appropriate to the safe and controlled surroundings of a leisure environment, but if you wanted to explore the mountain trails of the Pyrenees it would stay with you willingly enough. As a work truck, though, or for hardcore expedition use, you wouldn’t have to look far to find drawbacks.
This shouldn’t be even slightly off-putting to any potential Yeti buyers, and the same can be said for the level of off-road ability in the Scout. They are what they are, and they do what they do – and they do it very well. Even the Superb and Octavia, mere cars though they may be, are cars with benefits. And when you explore what Skoda’s latest four-wheel drive technology gives them, those benefits are very obvious indeed.
Superb 4x4
It stands to reason that if you like 4x4s, you like big vehicles. The Superb estate might not be as hulkingly enormous on the outside as a Discovery or Land Cruiser (or indeed a Freelander or RAV4), but we defy you to find a 4x4 of any kind with this much interior space. Not even the Disco 4 can match the Superb for rear legroom. It is, in a word, sensational. You don’t buy a car for legroom alone, though. It almost goes without saying that the Superb’s rear seats turn into a cargo bay of similarly enormous proportions, but it’s on the road (and, within reason, off it) that the vehicle’s 4x4 system comes into its own.
Using the latest-generation Haldex technology described elsewhere in this article, the Superb delivers a level of grip that’s hard to credit, even when pushed further than you’d ever consider normal in a car like this. It doesn’t understeer sloppily or lighten up on the way into corners the way vehicles with full-time four-wheel drive can, and it certainly doesn’t get tail-happy whether you’re chucking it around on the road or slithering along on gravel tracks. Instead, it just grips like a limpet, whether on dry roads, wet roads or things you can’t call roads.
The Superb is available in 4x4 form with a choice of 1.8 and 3.6-litre V6 petrol engines, or a 2.0-litre TDI in high and low states of tune. The diesels are torquey, quiet and impressively economical, the 3.6 genuinely quick and the 1.8 cheap to run but still every bit as powerful as you’d want. Even with the big petrol unit being hammered as hard as we dared, there was still no sign of the chassis getting unsettled, and it remained impressively quiet and bump-free in the cabin, too.
Combine this engineering with a similar standard of build quality, and you’ve got a 4x4 estate to reckon with. Depending on the spec you want and the amount of aggro you’re willing to give your dealer, you could get a new one for not much more than twenty grand, and even the full-house V6 needn’t cost more than the average junior SUV. It won’t have as much ground clearance, but it’ll tow as much weight, and it’ll look after you in high style in every situation. If you can find anything else with this much space, kit, quality and, yes, class for the same sort of money, buy it.