Skoda's Top Diesel
by David Finlay (30 Oct 06)

It's a tribute to Skoda's increasing prominence that it has had to change the badge used for its higher-performance cars over the years. There was a 130 RS back in the mid-70s, and although Ford had already claimed RS as its own by then the larger company didn't complain - if it noticed at all - that Skoda had decided to use the same initials.

Things were very different in 2000, when Skoda (now a much more significant brand thanks to investment from new owner Volkswagen) tried to reintroduce the badge for its most powerful Octavia. This time round, Ford was not at all happy, and insisted that Skoda should come up with an alternative. That's why the original hot Octavia was called vRS instead. Since then, vRS has also been used to denote the most powerful Fabia, and the two-litre turbo petrol version of the new Octavia. And now here it is again, relating this time to what appears to be an identical Octavia but is actually a turbo diesel.

The engine in question is Volkswagen's very familiar 2.0 TDI PD, which is used not only in a large number of VW Group products but is also bought in by other manufacturers (Dodge and Mitsubishi, for example) who don't have such an effective diesel of their own to use.

In terms of outright power, it's obviously not as strong as the T-FSI unit in the other Octavia vRS, but at 170bhp it's not exactly a weakling, and the 30bhp deficit to the T-FSI is largely balanced by the diesel's much better low-range performance - maximum torque, for example, can be produced from as low as 1800rpm, and the full 170bhp of power is available at a useful 4200rpm.

Flat-out, the TDI is 7mph slower flat out than the petrol, and takes 1.2 seconds longer to accelerate from rest to 62mph. But you might trade that for the urge with which the diesel can dig itself out of slow corners, and the massive 12.9mpg improvement in combined fuel economy.

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