Skoda Octavia VRS 2.0 TDI CR

Positivity has always been my approach to life. Always look on the bright side of life, as the Monty Python lot enthusiastically urged us. It certainly works with finding a parking space. Believe you’ll find one, and somehow a gap always magically materialises. Well that’s my experience anyway. Cars are better on the bright side too. I am loving the vivid paint shade, Race Blue, that we chose for our Octavia vRS. It is an uplifting colour to see waiting outside in the morning, and also has the advantage of being easy to spot at a distance in a car park. It is especially cheerful as a car colour at this time of year, when all those tiresomely popular car shades of silver, gunmetal, black and white merge into monochrome dreariness on winter roads. Flick through the pages of Diesel Car and see which models leap out at you. It’s not the 50 shades of grey that the motor industry endlessly woos us with. It’s the strong shades of blue, red and other eye-catching colours that command attention. They’re a great antidote to the monotony of dull coloured cars.

Our sporty Skoda is as vibrant with its colour scheme as it is with its performance. Bright blue paint, red trimmed upholstery, red stitched detailing around the interior, red brake callipers, they all make the car a positive eye feast and enhance its sporty character. Even more to the point, the performance is vivid too. Compared with the standard Volkswagen Group 2.0-litre TDI engine with 148bhp and 236 lb ft in other versions of the Octavia, the vRS has another 33bhp of power, an extra 44lb ft of torque, a top speed elevated by 9mph, and half a second sliced off the acceleration time. The result is positively yummy.

Three months into our long term test of the Octavia vRS, I am impressed by what a lot of car it feels for the money. We have a few extras on our car that bumps up the price by £3,770, but it is already well-equipped at the standard sub-£25k cost, and for that money you get hot hatch performance, 50-plus mpg in real world driving, and a car that knocks spots off most of its competitors for interior space and boot size. With a bit of a kitchen sink approach to packing, I don’t have to think twice about whether whatever I want to carry will fit into the car. Of course it will. The boot is a whopping 590 litres, and you can add a further 990 litres by lowering the back seats.

One feature our car has that I haven’t bothered much with yet is its £575 intelligent parking assistant. I’m old fashioned enough to reckon that if you can’t park without electronic assistance, you shouldn’t be driving. But I’ll have a play with it and let you know how it behaves. Something that doesn’t entirely behave is the sound system when the parking proximity sensors have been in use. The muted radio doesn’t immediately return to normal volume, and I tend to turn it back up impatiently. But it’s a small irritation in an otherwise thoroughly likeable car.