Post by Big Blue on Apr 28, 2019 22:52:05 GMT
It's back: Holiday car rental review. First bad: no upgrades as Vienna Europcar were fully booked over Easter so I had what I booked, which was a small jacked up family car by the VW group and in this case it was:
Yes a Škoda Karoq (where do they get these names from?).
I can confirm it fits the bill as a family car, but like most it's only good for 5 if there’s no child seats involved. Perhaps the car industry is involved in some kind of social engineering project to restrict us to less than three offspring. As you can see there is no centre seat if I place a Recaro car seat on one side, less so in days when we had two of the buggers....
It wasn't short of space otherwise, however. There was the usual removable-floor-section-from-the-boot malarky that pisses me right off: something to do with flat loading spaces but in a rental car you have a large felt covered board to stow somewhere. The Karoq, however, still managed to fit the cases and bags in with no large items in the cabin and managed this without the need to remove the rear parcel shelf, thus giving me an unrestricted rear view through the mirror. We don't do travelling light in our family:
In terms of refinement both W2.0 and T4 thought windows or a door were open on the motorway - more a sign of how quiet the Gorilla is I reckon. I thought it was reasonable enough and I have no idea which particular flavour of boat-fuelled engine it had under the bonnet but it was very able to keep up with traffic and cruised at 140kph with no issues whatsoever. This one was well equipped as most cars are and I’m guessing it was an SE as it had no Nav so it had a few extras, like heated seats and also when I looked on the configurator I see the black panel dash is an extra. Why is this? These things are peanuts and the whole moving-parts element of standard clocks must be starting to become more expensive than what is a TFT screen from a cheap kids' hand-held game.
Last summer I complained that the Golf I had hadn't really capitalised on the TFT screen and just gave a digital version of the standard dash. Glad to see that this one has changed that:
It also had a nice touch screen interface and physical controls for heating and such things, which you can also do from the touch screen. It had Apple CarPlay but as with other cars the iPhone nav doesn't appear in the dash TFT, only on the touch screen. To be quite frank that's just bollocks.
It's won some WhatCar COTY award for mid-size SUVs, I see. Not hard to see why: it's easy to drive, has lots of space and was very comfortable. It won’t win any driving awards but having said that it didn’t do anything silly, and one assumes that these are not targeting Lewis Hamilton wannabes.
Our Slovak nephew that lives across the border in Czech pointed out that they're not cheap even on the home market but in spite of that it has one more award to win: at 49.929mpg over 550kms it was the most fuel efficient hire car I've had and it was a long way from being the slowest, lightest or most awful to drive. If I was the kind of family car buyer that wants a family tool I’d have one.
It wasn't a bad wedding car either.
Yes a Škoda Karoq (where do they get these names from?).
I can confirm it fits the bill as a family car, but like most it's only good for 5 if there’s no child seats involved. Perhaps the car industry is involved in some kind of social engineering project to restrict us to less than three offspring. As you can see there is no centre seat if I place a Recaro car seat on one side, less so in days when we had two of the buggers....
It wasn't short of space otherwise, however. There was the usual removable-floor-section-from-the-boot malarky that pisses me right off: something to do with flat loading spaces but in a rental car you have a large felt covered board to stow somewhere. The Karoq, however, still managed to fit the cases and bags in with no large items in the cabin and managed this without the need to remove the rear parcel shelf, thus giving me an unrestricted rear view through the mirror. We don't do travelling light in our family:
In terms of refinement both W2.0 and T4 thought windows or a door were open on the motorway - more a sign of how quiet the Gorilla is I reckon. I thought it was reasonable enough and I have no idea which particular flavour of boat-fuelled engine it had under the bonnet but it was very able to keep up with traffic and cruised at 140kph with no issues whatsoever. This one was well equipped as most cars are and I’m guessing it was an SE as it had no Nav so it had a few extras, like heated seats and also when I looked on the configurator I see the black panel dash is an extra. Why is this? These things are peanuts and the whole moving-parts element of standard clocks must be starting to become more expensive than what is a TFT screen from a cheap kids' hand-held game.
Last summer I complained that the Golf I had hadn't really capitalised on the TFT screen and just gave a digital version of the standard dash. Glad to see that this one has changed that:
It also had a nice touch screen interface and physical controls for heating and such things, which you can also do from the touch screen. It had Apple CarPlay but as with other cars the iPhone nav doesn't appear in the dash TFT, only on the touch screen. To be quite frank that's just bollocks.
It's won some WhatCar COTY award for mid-size SUVs, I see. Not hard to see why: it's easy to drive, has lots of space and was very comfortable. It won’t win any driving awards but having said that it didn’t do anything silly, and one assumes that these are not targeting Lewis Hamilton wannabes.
Our Slovak nephew that lives across the border in Czech pointed out that they're not cheap even on the home market but in spite of that it has one more award to win: at 49.929mpg over 550kms it was the most fuel efficient hire car I've had and it was a long way from being the slowest, lightest or most awful to drive. If I was the kind of family car buyer that wants a family tool I’d have one.
It wasn't a bad wedding car either.
