4th report: Refinement and efficiency
Other than the slight hizzy-fit I experienced with the infotainment system last month, which thankfully has shown no sign of reoccurring, the Enyaq has performed flawlessly so far and obviously, I’m hoping that situation will continue.
For the most part, I have been driving it in a ‘beneficial’ manner. By beneficial, I mean driving like I am taking my Great Aunt Agatha to the garden centre for afternoon tea and consequently, I’ve recently been averaging close to 4 miles kWh.
With its soothing ride quality and hushed undertones, the Enyaq is a spectacularly refined motor so it’s perhaps not surprising that it actively encourages a more relaxed driving style. Like most luxury-biased motors however, it doesn’t take too kindly to the type of polyrhythms and dynamic improvisations brought about by a cross-country dash when the M25 has gone into lockdown and the check-in deadline for an early morning flight to Prague is looming ever closer.
Finding myself in such a predicament and compelled to take to the back lanes of Kent I engaged Sport mode, which activates the less forgiving end of the damper spectrum to better control body movements and simultaneously sharpens the steering and powertrain reactions. There are very few petrol or diesel cars that can hold a candle to a torque-rich EV’s instantaneous power output when it comes to ghosting by half the building industry’s fleet of Transit tipper trucks on a slippery backroad on a dreary Monday morning. Thankfully I made my flight, although not without giving myself a few heart flutters on route, and I’m not talking about those brought about by my double espresso alarm shot.
Yes, the Enyaq can hustle when asked to but at the end of the day there’s no arguing with physics and although the suspension does an admiral job of keeping things shiny side up and the tyres provide a reassuring amount of mechanical grip when it comes to scrubbing off speed with a 90-degree direction change looming large, the Enyaq’s brakes get somewhat coy about the prospect of engaging in a wrestling match with Mr Newton. Indeed, slowing the Enyaq’s two-plus ton payload from high speed can be a pupil-dilating experience even when calling upon the motor’s heaviest retardation setting via the steering wheel-mounted paddles and challenging the tensile strength of my best brogue’s laces to busting point.
Thankfully, journeys involving these levels of haste are more the exception than the norm in my life these days and any inclination to rush around like a headless chicken is tempered by the detrimental effect on the range and the additional costs these types of hot shoe antics entail.
Now I’m on record as saying I don’t have a home charger but I’m happy to take the financial hit by charging from public networks because I feel the Enyaq is, in effect, a large luxury car and therefore there will be a certain premium associated with its running costs. Consequently, I’ve rationalised the strain on my wallet to a certain extent but my zen-like thinking was blown out of the water recently when I plugged into a rapid charger next to a guy in a spanking new Rolls Royce Spectre. I could be mistaken but I’m guessing he had a few bob, but that didn’t stop him from launching into a diatribe about the exorbitant price of charging from these rapid charge cash leverage machines. Thankfully, or not as it turned out, I had a copy of the June issue of Business Car with me and I pointed my well-heeled friend to Jack Carfrae’s piece regarding the sky-high pricing of rapid charging versus domestic tariffs. Having devoured Jack’s piece, it didn’t long for him to pronounce the industry insiders’ defence relating to the immense set up costs of rapid chargers justifying their sky high tariffs as ‘absolute tosh.’ Say what you really mean.
Pointing out that new charging stations aren’t that difficult to install, as motorway services aren’t ‘in the middle of nowhere’ as they are on the ‘blooming motorway.’ He then went further, stating, to his knowledge all those shiny shops and the petrol stations, which also charge exorbitant amounts for everything from caviar sandwiches to liquid gold unleaded, weren’t powered by water wheels, so the idea of an entirely new infrastructure being required to construct an EV charging station was a total red herring. Yikes, and I thought I was the only one with a PhD in moanaholics.
| Model | Skoda Enyaq Coupe 85x SportLine Plus |
| P11D price | £50,250 |
| As tested | £55,370 |
| WLTP Combined Range | 332 miles |
| Test consumption/Range | 3.6 miles per/kWh |
| Mileage | 4,380 |
3rd report: Shock infotainment drama
Everything was going so well. So much so that I was even beginning to think VW’s infotainment boffins had successfully cracked the enigma code and finally resolved all the frustrating issues that have plagued its befuddled interfaces for almost half a decade. My thoughts even turned to how future generations of Volkswagen, Seat, Cupra, Porsche, Audi, Skoda, Lamborghini and Bentley owners might one day be blissfully ignorant of all these technical glitches. But no.
The day had started much like every other day, climbing behind the sexy sports steering wheel of our long-term Skoda Enyaq, firing up my Waze navigation App and slipping my i phone onto the charging mat, making a mental note to relocate its shiny carcass into the cupholder after a judicious period, to avoid any heatstroke induced telephone meltdown. Yes, all seemed well with the world. For heaven’s sake, it had even stopped raining for the first time since September so as I slipped the snuff-box-sized drive selector into forward progression mode and tuned into the joyful unification of Tina Turner and the comforting crunch of tyres suppressing gravel, I spirited my way down the driveway, confident of yet another seamless day of Enyaq conveyancing. Or so I thought, because even before Tina had reached the outskirts of the Nutbush city limits the Enyaq’s screen began to roll like the tumblers in a Vegas slot machine and simultaneously danced a zig-zagged interference pattern akin to a 1960’s valve-powered TV. At this juncture I couldn’t help but be reminded of the great 1960’s actor and social commentator Peter Ustinov, who famously coined the phrase ‘It’s the hope that kills you.’
Anyway, although switching everything off and on again failed to resolve matters and the problem persisted until I reached my destination, after a prolonged period of downtime involving a leisurely lunch, things returned to their natural equilibrium and the problem hasn’t reoccurred.
Maybe it was my phone that triggered the malaise but surely the system, as advertised, should support AppleCarPlay. Then again, I know there are other instances where this is simply not the case. For example, the Enyaq’s inbuilt navigation system is extremely effective at suggesting appropriate charging stops along the way and factoring in additional charging time to calculate an accurate ETA, but it is not so great at predicting impending traffic problems. I naively thought I would get around this issue by simultaneously running live updates from Waze and skipping between the two displays but to my dismay enabling Waze simultaneously disables the inbuilt navigation. Doh!
I have been super busy of late, consequently, I’ve spent an awful lot of time travelling up and down the M1 at 50mph. Apparently, this is because smart motorways didn’t turn out to be as smart as some nice-but-dim transport department mandarins imagined. The upshot being the M1 is under speed restrictions for what seems like hundreds of miles because the inside lane is out of commission while safety laybys are constructed. Do we think laybys every few miles are an effective alternative to a hard shoulder, or do we think this is, yet another ill-informed decision made by people who haven’t the foggiest idea what day it is? Answers on a postcard please.
At least these restrictions have helped maximise the Enyaq’s range potential. By now we all know that EV’s are extremely sensitive to changing temperatures, so it’s difficult to know with any absolute certainty what their true range potential will be on any given day. For the record, my long-term recordings have shown an average return of 3.6 kWh. We also know that the most effective way of getting the best out of an EV is to never charge them beyond 80% as inbuilt restrictors limit the intensity of the power the battery will accept beyond this point. Primarily this is to avoid overheating, so consequently attempting to get a 100% charge takes an inordinate amount of time. Consequently, although the Enyaq’a official range is 332 miles, often an 80% charge gives me around 240 miles to play with.
In practice, I don’t tend to use more than 200 miles, as a combination of range anxiety and the additional charging times associated with replenishing a severely depleted battery compels me to recharge before I drop below 20%.
Sometimes I think if only we could get those lovely folks at the Ministry of transport to work to 20% efficiency that would be a start.
2nd report: Counting the cost of public charging
To me, food is nothing more than fuel. It either tastes of salt or sugar or a combination of the two, consequently I’m just as happy tucking into a plate of beans on toast in front of the telly as I am scoffing a prime cut of rib-eye in some fancy Michelin-starred restaurant.
That’s probably why, even when I factor in the cost of staff and the price of fancy premises, I struggle to get my head around the enormous price differential between these two dining experiences. That said, this fiscal disparity pales into insignificance compared to charging your EV at home versus boosting it at a motorway service station.
Now, I haven’t got a home charger, so own brands running costs simply aren’t on my menu when it comes to juicing up our long-term Skoda Enyaq, threfore, I try not to think about the costs involved. It is what it is, as they say, however, on a couple of occasions, I have been shaken from my blissful state of denial by a few well-meaning souls, who have unintentionally rubbed my nose in it.
Having parked up like Siamese twins next to a fellow Enyaq owner at one Midlands-based motorway multi-point charging station, my brand brethren and I whiled away the first few minutes of our down-time discussing the various merits of my swoopy roofed coupe versus his more traditionally styled Enyaq. Of course, it didn’t take long before the vexed subject of motorway monopolies and punitive charging regimes reared its ugly head. While we both agreed that because you still come across so many provincial charging outposts that are either the devil’s own work to operate or simply refuse to put out, we gladly stump up a king’s ransom, 79p per kiloWatt hour to be precise, for the rock-solid reliability and fast energy delivery motorways based one arm bandits deliver.
Feeling the warm glow of kindred spirits up until this point, my fellow conspiracy theorist suddenly turned turncoat on me, admitting he did indeed have a home charger, meaning he could re-energise his Enyaq overnight at an off-peak rate of just 7p per kilowatt.
7p versus 79p! Suddenly my beans and steak analogy began to look more like a bowl of prison cell gruel versus a night at Le Gavroche dining on sautéed swan complimented by a side order of profanities served up by Gordon Ramsay.
Still, short of marching on Downing Street and powerless as I am to do anything about the soaring costs of electricity, I think it best if I console myself by concentrating on the many positive aspects of the Enyaq and draw solace from the fact that every luxury car comes with associated lofty running costs.
Granted, the Enyaq doesn’t have a prestige badge or quite the same level of interior sophistication as a Mercedes S Class or a Bentley Bentayga but in many respects, it’s the equal of these sorts of high-end vehicles. Chief amongst the Enyaq’s virtues are its exceptional levels of comfort and relaxing hush at all speeds and its vast amount of interior space; the latter perhaps not so surprising given Skoda’s traditional USP is to provide you with more metal for your cash than any similarly priced rival.
Gripes so far? Well not a lot really. I find it a wee bit frustrating that the drive mode always defaults to ‘Normal’ every time the car is switched off, especially as ‘Normal’ is a misnomer because the initial reactions in this mode are pretty darn sharp. As a result, I always try and remember to select Eco mode to produce a less feisty driveaway reaction. Thankfully I can do this by simply pressing a hard key located beneath the large central infotainment screen. Given I’ve been one of the staunchest critics of every VW group supplied infotainment system since 2019 and I haven’t so far had cause to criticise the Enyaq’s hi-def device probably speaks volumes. Touch wood, so far it hasn’t come up with a single error message and although I find it a wee bit frustrating that the cabin temperature needs to be adjusted via the screen, rather than simply twisting a dial, at least I can summon up the climate menu by hitting a single hard key. What’s more, it is simple to see how to raise or lower the ambient conditions in daylight as well as when driving at night, unlike the previous generation screens where some silly sausage forgot to backlight the temperature sliders. Speaking of sausages.
1st report: An absolute bargain
If you’re tired of hearing media types starting every presentation with ‘we’re so excited to share this with you’ then forgive me, because when it comes to the Skoda Enyaq I’m closing in on a state of rapture.
Granted, £55k for a Skoda may seem a bit on the steep side but when you dig into the Enyaq’s DNA and begin to appreciate how much quality engineering you’re getting for your money, it is hard to think of it as anything other than an absolute bargain.
Just considering matters from a comfort and refinement perspective it is clear that the Enyaq is the equal of many luxury cars costing twice as much.
Obviously, because power comes from a torque-rich electric motor and with no suck-bang-blow vibrations to quell, the Enyaq’s is quieter and generates less vibration than any V8 or V12 ever invented, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Given its imposing dimensions and substantial 2.2 tones kerb weight, the overall road and wind noise suppression levels are nothing short of extraordinary. Yes, laminated side glass helps blot out some of the windy side of the equation but given the enormous frontal resistance that bluff front end presents to the atmosphere you don’t need to be Poirot to work out there has to be a loft’s worth of sound deadening insulation secreted in and around the bulkhead.
Then there’s the way the exquisitely tuned variable dampers and the generously proportioned side-walled 20-inch tyres reduce the chaotic crashing and banging of challenging UK road surface imperfections to a mere murmur. Gliding down the road with a serene composure that many limos fitted with allegedly superior air-suspension can only dream of, perhaps the only head-scratcher is why Skoda hasn’t made more of the Enyaq’s luxury car credentials.
Many folks will also equate space to luxury and from this perspective, the Enyaq slides effortlessly into VIP lounge territory. With acres of front and rear legroom, a totally flat floor and plush seats, kitted out with heating elements, the only items lacking for rear passengers are a copy of the FT and a glass of bubbly.
Personally, my idea of luxury is not being in a constant state of range anxiety and to this end the Enyaq is already playing a blinder. With an official range of 322 miles and a warm weather forecast boost on the horizon, hopefully I won’t experience too much downtime sipping acrid motorway coffee while awaiting a recharge.
Despite being the more stylish coupe version of the Enyaq, the 570-litre boot is simply enormous. So, if you’re a kitchen sink kind of a packer or need to transport a couple of tripe hounds, the only downside is the rather high rear sill your best friends will need to negotiate to gain entry. This location does expose the one discernable blot on the report card so far. Such a large boot obviously requires an equally large rear hatch, which isn’t really a problem as a powered tailgate takes care of the heavy lifting but for some reason, the rear glass is bereft of a wiper blade. It’s not the end of the world as any rain quickly runs off the steeply inclined screen within a few hundred yards of forward momentum but it is a wee bit sub-optimal when reversing out of tight parking spots first thing on a drab, damp morning. Just as well all-round audible parking sensors and reversing camera complete with a bird’s eye view display come standard on our SportLine Plus model.
If you like the sound of all this but are still feeling a wee bit reticent about the price tag you can save £5k by ignoring the Advanced and Maxx packages. Our car is fitted with both and while the Advanced pack includes an upgraded infotainment system, a kicking Canton sound system, and a head up display but undoubtedly the standout feature is the crystal face. This frontal light display includes no fewer than 131 LEDs to illuminate the vertical ribs and the horizontal bar of the front grille to produce a truly startling facade.
The Maxx pack includes additional nice-to-haves such as upgraded seats and park assist, plus the dynamic chassis package, which adds the variable-rate shock absorbers. However, having driven more basic Enyaqs without this level of suspension sophistication I know the differences are very subtle. Consequently, even at this early stage of my six-month long assessment my advice would be to try before you buy, but regardless of spec, most definitely buy.
Standard equipment: 20in alloy wheels, Panoramic sunroof, keyless entry, remote central locking, tri-zone climate control, heated seats, digital cockpit, 13in infotainment screen sat-navigation, 3-spoke leather heated sports multi-function steering wheel with paddles for recuperation level selection, 2 front and 2 rear USB type C sockets, wireless Apple Carplay, wireless phone charger. Adaptive cruise control with speed limiter, dynamic Full matrix LED headlights lights with cornering function, lane assist, forward collision warning with automatic braking, driver alert system, privacy glass and acoustic side windows, front and rear parking sensors, rear view camera.
Options: Advanced Package Includes (infotainment package plus (head up display), Light and view package plus (crystal face), Climate package plus (heated front and rear seats and heated windscreen),CANTON sound system), Maxx Package (over Advanced Package) includes (Comfort seat package plus electrically adjustable front seats with memory function, power adjustable lumbar support for front seats and massage function for driver’s seat, Parking package plus (area view camera, park assist, trained parking), Drive sport package plus (dynamic chassis control, three-spoke leather heated sports multi-function steering wheel with paddles for recuperation level selection, progressive steering).
