It would be an unusual person who bought a brand-new estate car in order to take it racing and see the hair rise on the back of their arms. Most people feel an estate coming on when they discover that their family contains more children and small bicycles than it previously did - in other words, at exactly the moment the urge to go racing dies quietly beneath the urge finally to get on with it and sort out the lawn. Or else they buy one because they are fed up with the dog licking their head while they are trying to drive.
Either way, the purchase of an estate car tends to be a mature choice, born of a collection of sobering life experiences, rather than an act of hormonal incontinence conducted in a hurry and a shower of cash. It envisages driving as a logistical problem requiring sensible solutions in the way the purchase of, say, a Lamborghini Murcielago does not. An estate car is a shrug of resignation rather than a whoop of glee, and it is not merely coincidental that most of them look like extremely boring wardrobes tipped through 90 degrees.
However, just when you thought it was safe to cross the road, here comes the new Skoda Octavia vRS Estate, a special muscled-up, Murray Walker-injected version of the Octavia Estate which, in its original, quieter format, has always been as dull and dutiful as any other car of its kind, but at least has had the good grace to be cheap about it.
The new vRS version is swollen by the insertion of a 180bhp turbo-charged engine. This means you step into the car expecting the usual estately torpor, then get sucked into a black hole of speed and only regain control of your facial muscles and the nerve endings in your extremities about half an hour later.
In most estates, if you set out early enough on a Friday evening, you might expect to reach 60mph before the weekend ended. And then, on account of the momentum gathered by your family and almost everything it owns, you won't be able to come to a complete stop until the following Wednesday. The vRS works differently. It reaches 60mph faster than any wardrobe really should. Sink the accelerator and watch that labrador hit the back window.
The car then goes on to achieve speeds of more than twice the legal limit, at which point both you and the dog get arrested and quite possibly imprisoned. But at least you will have defied estate-car odds by stopping quickly and tidily, and almost certainly without turning sideways and blocking lanes in both directions, which is always a hazard when driving a large piece of furniture.
Clearly this is the latest admirable trick from Skoda, who have pulled off many neat stunts in the past few years, not least in crawling out from under the weight of the worst public image in the European motoring industry.
Yet within a decade of the post-revolutionary buy-out by Volkswagen, the proud green-and-black badge had come to stand for competitively-priced sturdiness, coupled with a kind of understated stylishness - to the point that no one could ever again claim that the chassis were constructed at gun-point and held together with spit and low-grade carpet tacks.
It's a measure of Skoda's new-found reliability that the police - who tend to be fussy about cars and absolutely hate it when they won't start - now use the vRS version of the Octavia hatchback, with added roof-level hazard lights (sadly unavailable to the general public). Apparently, the Metropolitan force particularly approve of the Octavia's brakes (they awarded them Class One status in their own tests) and may even be persuaded to use them from time to time. The consequence is you can now get busted by a Skoda. Brezhnev must be spinning in his grave.
If police work involved taking families to Cornwall, they would probably bring the Octavia vRS state into the fleet as well. Skoda first revealed this version of the car at the Birmingham Motorshow last year, but you couldn't really see it because it had Alicia Rowntree, the model, lying all over it. With her out of the way, one can properly appreciate the styling differences from the original.
These include thicker front and rear bumpers, a rear-roof spoiler, matt-black roof rails, some serious-looking spoked alloys through which you can see a set of green brake calipers, and, for those who like that kind of thing, a big, fat sporty exhaust pipe. They don't entirely remove the sense - endemic among estates - that the car could well have come flat-packed from a DIY centre. But they do diminish it.
Inside, the clocks are steel-rimmed, the pedals are clad in aluminium and there is enough sleek leather around to satisfy even Marc Almond. Yet even by bolting on every available extra, you can only make this car cost £17,600 - a snip, surely, for a mobile kennel, especially such a fast one.
