No life
It's a Skoda.
Honest.
Toby Young
You may scoff, but this is no ordinary Skoda. It's a brand new Skoda Fabia, What Car's Car of the Year 2000. It can go from 0-60 in 11.5 seconds and has a top speed of 115 mph. Skoda may not be a particularly distinguished brand, but it's owned by Volkswagen and the Fabia has the same small-car platform that the next generation of Polos will have, not to mention the Seat Ibizas and Audi A2s. As I sit behind the wheel of my metallic black machine I can tell myself I'm driving tomorrow's car today.
Of course, I'm the laughing stock of all my friends. If I had f1 for every Skoda joke I've heard — 'what d'you call a Skoda with a sun roof? A skip' — I'd be rich enough to afford a proper car by now. But I have a sneaking suspicion that Skodas are about to become extremely fashionable. It's one of those brands, like Hush Puppies, that are so uncool they eventually pass through the fashion equivalent of the fourth dimen- sion and become incredibly cool. You don't believe me? Nicky Haslam, the style- obsessed interior designer who threw a party for Jerry Hall last Sunday, drives a Skoda Fabia.
Admittedly, there are aspects of it I don't like. For instance, there's a sticker on the back windscreen, put there by the manufac- turers, which says, 'It's a Skoda. Honest.' That's a little too try-hard. After all, it's not as if anyone is going to mistake it for a Fer- rari or an Aston Martin. It's a constant reminder that Skoda used to be a byword for shoddy, East European engineering: Vorsprung durch kaputnik.
Another source of irritation is that the model I have is called an 'Elegance', pro- nounced so it rhymes with pants rather than punts. Skoda are particularly bad at names — an earlier model was called a Tavorie. Still, it could be worse. An Oxford contemporary of mine recently bought a Volkswagen Sharon, pronounced so it rhymes with the famous Israeli soldier rather than Tracy's friend. He's actually gone to the trouble of covering up the word `Sharon' with black masking tape.
The Elegance also has various extras that I can never see myself using. For instance, heated seats may be necessary in the Czech Republic, where temperatures in winter can fall to scrotum-freezing levels, but aren't essential in Shepherd's Bush. The reason I plumped for the Elegance, rather than the cheaper Comfort, is because Straight Eight, the Skoda dealership on the Goldhawk Road where I bought it, had one in the showroom, whereas I would have had to wait six to eight weeks for a Com- fort. If I'd waited I could have had an X- reg model, rather than the W-reg one I've ended up with, but since the residual value of Skodas is practically nothing that wasn't an overriding consideration. (`How do you double the value of a Skoda? Fill it up with petrol.') On the whole I'm happy with my pur- chase. Last week I took it on an 1,100-mile round trip to Scotland and it performed faultlessly throughout. I even managed to crank it up to 120 mph on a downhill stretch of the M6, I was clocked by several speed cameras on a stretch of the A90 between Edinburgh and Aberdeen doing over 100 mph, but I'm confident that when the police see that the car in question was a Skoda, they'll assume their equipment was faulty. That reminds me of another Skoda joke: 'Why do Skodas have rear windscreen wipers? To remove the flies that crash into them.'
My proudest moment so far was in Barcelona. No, I hadn't driven all the way there, but when I stepped off the plane I was immediately confronted by an exact replica of my car, right down to the black metallic paint. It was on display for adver- tising purposes. One of the friends I was travelling with, an investment banker, said, `Oh look, it's the new Alfa."No, it isn't,' I said. 'It's a Skoda. Honest.'
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