2.0 TSI 190 SE L Act DSG 5dr

Beautifully boring

After I bought this car, I had buyer's remorse for a while, but I grew to love the car.
It doesn't do anything particularly well, apart from swallow up luggage, but it does everything unobtrusively well. Acceleration is good from the 190PS 2.0L TSI engine, but it's not blisteringly quick. You never feel short of power, and you never feel like things are going to get out of hand. Steering is light, a bit uncommunicative, but perfectly acceptable. It firms up at speed and gets light at low speed, but it does it in such a way that you don't notice it's doing it.
There are few surprises with this car, other than its ability to accommodate luggage, and that's a good thing. One surprise is the lack of a CD player. All you get is an SD card slot.

The DSG gearbox, much maligned by many, works well in practice, and having got used to a DSG, it's hard to imagine going back to a manual. While it would be nice to have paddle controls, knocking the gearstick to the side gives a sequential-style gearbox control, though it seems like it's reversed. Push forward to go to a higher gear, pull back to go to a lower gear. I don't use manual much, and if I need snappy gear responses, I can quickly toggle the car into "SPORT" mode, which gives full power and holds the gears for longer before changing up.

The different driving modes of this car are quite clever. Not in Skoda's "Simply Clever" way, but just plain old clever, bordering on complicated. In "ECO" driving mode, the engine is torque-limited for economy driving up to 5300rpm, over-ridden by full throttle, and to make quick progress, quite a bit more throttle is needed. Also featured in "ECO" mode is a coasting feature, where when the throttle is released, the car coasts with no engine braking until the brakes are applied and the gearbox clutch is re-engaged.
In standard "DRIVE" mode, the car drives in the Budack cycle, with inlet valves closing early, until a little over 3000rpm, when normal valve operation is initiated. What this means is that despite being able to nearly hit 150mph, it's not hard to hit 50mpg on a run, which is remarkable for a petrol car with this performance. Typical MPG is somewhere in the low 40's, but it's easy to reduce that with a heavy right foot.
The 17" wheels and tyres provide a good mix of comfort and performance at a sensible price.

It's a very easy car to drive and be comfortable in. It's not an exciting car, but then it's not supposed to be. There aren't many of these 2.0 TSI Octavias about, with most people opting for the 1.5TSI or the 2.0vRS. I like how this car offers a good slice of the vRS performance (the sub 7-second 0-60 time, for example), with some of the 1.5TSI economy and practicality. That said, for a lot of people, the very capable 150PS 1.5TSI is a more sensible choice if you're keen on economy with decent performance, while the vRS offers a near hot-hatch performance if you want a sporty but sensible car.

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