14 Million Skodas

(Wednesday 1 February 2012)

Skoda has announced that its 14 millionth car - a Superb Laurin & Klement special edition (whose aptness will become apparent shortly) - left the production line at Kvasiny earlier this week and is about to be delivered to its German customer.

Some clarification is in order here, because not all of the 13,999,999 cars built before this one wore Skoda badges. The first were produced by Laurin & Klement, a Czech company founded in 1895 by gentlemen with those surnames (the first name in each case being Vaclav) to build bicycles and motorbikes.

Laurin & Klement diversified into cars in 1905, and in the 1920s it was taken over by the much longer-established Skoda Works. In claiming to have built 14 million cars, the present-day Skoda company is counting right back to those first Laurin & Klements of 1905, which we think is fair enough.

After a relatively gentle start, Skoda production has accelerated rapidly in recent years. It took 86 years for the first five million cars to be built, but under Volkswagen ownership Skoda built another five million in only 15 years. Less than two years after achieving that milestone it had churned out another two million.

According to current plans, this is only the start. 879,200 Skodas were sold worldwide last year, and the target for 2018 is to increase this to "at least" 1.5 million.

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