Should you ever find yourself driving through the Arctic and a herd of reindeer suddenly scuttle into the middle of the icy road ahead of you, then the new Skoda Octavia 4x4 estate is the sort of car it is very, very good to be behind the wheel of.
When I was a teenager, way back in Skoda's bad old ugly-duckling days, a pal's dad owned a bright orange one. If you turned the radio up, the car all but came to a standstill. Nowadays they have brakes - very sharp brakes - and there are four reindeer in the Arctic still alive today thanks to that piece of progress. (Actually, they may be dead by now; reindeer, we later learned, aren't very bright, having yet to twig that locals often respond to their friendly advances by shooting them, eating them and wearing them.)
This sortie into 4x4 territory is Skoda's attempt to cash in on what could be called the Chelsea-tractor backlash, the feeling - shared by an increasingly vocal band - that there are now too many hulking, planet-destroying 4x4s out there being piloted, in the main, by fake-tanned fools whose idea of rough driving conditions is running out of Wet Ones. So, for those who genuinely desire (and possibly even need) the extra security of four-wheel drive to tackle tough terrain but don't want it to cost the earth (in either sense), the Czechs have handily squeezed a 4x4 system into a normal-sized estate. The result is a 4x4 that's a whole lot easier on the wallet, the planet, and hopefully the conscience.
Skoda is equally proud of the fact that this has been accomplished without any loss of boot space, which is not always the case in 4x4 versions. With the seats down, the manual says, there's 1,600 litres of room back there, and if anyone can think of a sensible way of testing that figure, do write in.
To show its confidence in the robustness of its brainchild, Skoda has decided to launch it in one of the most extreme places on the planet: inside the Arctic Circle, where it can get to -30C on a good day. There's a book out right now called Shipwrecked, which relates the horrific story of four Russian walrus-hunters who got marooned in the Arctic Circle in 1743. They had to survive in sub-zero conditions, living off reindeer and repelling polar bear attacks with homemade spears. For six years. The school run this ain't.
The first test involved a spin round a snowtrack dotted with road cones, some of which were soon squashed flat or hanging off bumpers. This offered an early introduction to the wonders of the "magic button", the little switch on the dashboard marked "ESP". This stands for electronic stability programme, which is nothing particularly new, but Skoda seem to have taken this to a whole new level - an Arctic level.
Even on these frozen wastes, ESP managed to tweak the brakes and throttle to avoid any skidding whatsoever. Or, to put it simply, it stops the car from behaving as if it's being driven by a hoodie in a carpark after dark. Any hair-raising, back-end-swinging ride is transformed into a safe, sensible, straightforward trip. To put it even more simply, that button is dad. I switched it off while slaloming neatly round the cones and instantly ploughed right into three of them.
An off-road forest track was next. (Off road in the middle of the Arctic: the satellite navigation system simply gave up. It was reduced to showing a solitary arrow on a black background: its way of saying, I suppose, that you are in big trouble.) The two-litre engine hurtled the car into and out of ruts and ditches, devoured the bends and pounded down the straights, as two men in a tow truck waited idly for business. It was as if the normally relaxed engine had suddenly woken up. "More," it seemed to scream, "more, more, more."
It was quite a performance, and one more chapter in Skoda's own velvet revolution. History records that the first Skoda Octavia, also called the Spartak, left the gates of the factory in Mlada Boleslav in 1959, possibly under its own steam. It has now conquered the Arctic, on- and off-road. And while Skoda may be VW's budget brand, the quality of the interior and the level of equipment (air-conditioned glove compartment, rain-activated wipers) is easily comparable to a Golf. A triumph of engineering over image, it is even beginning to look quite stylish. Well, slightly stylish.
The grand finale was to be a mad dash across a frozen lake, but sadly, global warming got there first. What was normally an esplanade of ice several metres thick was now a wafer-thin sheet above freezing water. Who knows, maybe the Octavia had a button you could press to get you across safely without dropping into the lake, back wheels first. Although that would have been one way of testing the capacity of the boot.
· Giles Smith returns next week.
