The point has been made on this page before (and with due ruefulness) that the golden age of the Skoda joke is over. This seismic development in the history of humour was noted here a while ago in a survey of the Octavia 4x4 - the former communist company's first and celebrated attempt at a four-wheel drive vehicle - and we will have cause to make the point again now in considering the brand new Fabia estate.
Ten years into their association with VW, which brought this seemingly knackered Czech company into revivifying contact with brilliant western innovations such as switches that worked and doors that both opened and closed, Skoda is quite rightly celebrating one of the greatest image turnarounds since Sting remodelled himself as someone with a warm and self-deprecating sense of humour.
Nevertheless, even as one stands to applaud this unlikely recasting, one might have a little difficulty swallowing the use by the company, in some literature regarding the new Fabia, of the phrase "Skoda's traditional values".
It is, after all, a mere decade since Skodas were routinely associated with litter bins. Unless you were going to obliterate history altogether (and there was certainly, for a while, a vogue for that, where Skoda come from), Skoda's "traditional values" would have to include crumbly welding, cow-like sluggishness and a commitment to the tea-chest as a source of aesthetic inspiration. The company has definitely been excitingly reborn, but "traditional values"? There's no need to get cocky.
Needless to say, the Fabia estate doesn't reflect Skoda's traditional values at all. Rather it stands as a shining, silver (in the case of the one that I drove) testament to the company's modern values, which include comfort, roominess, a modicum of unforced style and - even if the days of buying a Skoda for a loaf of bread and a pat of butter are now behind us - extraordinary value for money.
Those values found their best expression yet in the Fabia, in its original, five-door hatchback form, which is like a VW Polo only much smarter to look at and which could even, at a quick glance, be mistaken for something by Audi. The new estate version, in pursuit of further roominess, balloons the car into something far less pretty - but that's the effect with any estate version of any car. The important thing is that the longer Fabia retains the comfort and value for money aspects of the original, which it easily does.
Being a prolonged hatchback, rather than a prolonged saloon, it's not the largest estate car in the world. Country types with Volvos the length of cricket pitches might even scoff at its pretensions to cater for a properly rural life, with all the farming equipment and livestock that inevitably entails.
And true, the Fabia does feel a little more urban than that. It's hard to imagine using it to menace, say, sheep. Still, urban people have their paraphernalia too, and the Fabia is capacious enough. With one of the rear seats down, you could get a coffin in and still have room for a couple of children.
If you're in the market for an estate car, it goes without saying that you have already decided, whether willingly or not, to let your life's baggage take precedence over the pleasures available to you in driving. No one ever got behind the wheel of an estate expecting to raise the hairs on the backs of their hands with the car's performance - except maybe on a winding mountain road. The Fabia is, naturally enough, completely unthrilling to drive. But it moves tightly and tidily and gives no impression that it's about to slew into oncoming traffic at corners, and one can ask for no more from a car this shape.
A problem this expanded Fabia may face - even with its roof rails on - is that estate cars in general are not presently the most alluring or fashionable choice on offer to the urban motorist who is looking for room to stow clobber. These days there is a host of sports utility vehicles and people carriers (both mini and full-size) that come with whole warrens of storage space and allow you to drive around with your spare wheel mounted like a hunting trophy on the back door. (Top Gear magazine has taken to referring, unimprovably, to vehicles at the top-end of this group as "toff roaders".)
But of course it's not everyone's ambition to sit 5ft off the ground in a car that looks like it may originally have been designed to see active service in Korea. For fans of the traditional estate shape, yet ones who don't necessarily need to move grandfather clocks on a regular basis, the compact Fabia may represent the smart selection.
Incidentally, my mother-in-law drives a Skoda. That's not the beginning of a joke. It's a fact.
