After racking up 10,000 km and moving onto their second long-term Slavia, Autocar India shares their comprehensive insights into the Skoda Slavia 1.5 TSI DSG. Here’s a breakdown of what truly impressed and what fell short, making it an essential read if you’re considering this car.
The Good Bits: What We Loved
The Skoda Slavia 1.5 TSI DSG comes highly recommended, earning a “double thumbs up” for its ability to combine practical transport with an engaging driving experience.
- Striking Design & Practical Clearance: The Slavia’s design is highlighted by its creases, which are beautifully accentuated in the matte shade, especially in sunlight. The bright work and chrome on the grill and headlights also add depth and beauty. Crucially, despite its long wheelbase, the car boasts a ground clearance of 179 mm at its lowest point, making it almost as good as most SUVs and highly practical for diverse road conditions.
- Massive Boot Space: With a 521-liter boot, the Slavia offers generous space, surpassing many other cars in practicality.
- Quality Interior Elements: While the interior is a mixed bag, the Slavia features solidly built parts like the glove box, a small cubby hole, and tough, solid doors.
- Driver-Focused Comfort & Tech:
- Excellent Steering Wheel & Touchscreen: The steering wheel is exceptionally well put together, and the touchscreen is praised for its functionality, vibrant color, depth, and quick response.
- Powered & Cooled Seats: The powered seats are a significant upgrade, allowing for easy driving position adjustments that help alleviate back pressure on long drives. The cooled seats are a particular blessing, especially when getting into a warm car.
- Spacious Cabin: The cabin is big, offering plenty of space in the rear with ample legroom, even behind a standard driving position.
- Exceptional Driving Dynamics:
- Ideal Suspension: The long-travel suspension is deemed “just ideal for our roads,” capably handling large craters and big holes with ease, providing a worry-free driving experience daily.
- Strong Performance: The 1.5-liter engine delivers a robust 150 horsepower, with a particularly “meaty mid-range” that provides strong performance for intracity excursions and confident high-speed cruising.
- Confidence-Inspiring Handling: The car feels incredibly planted on the road despite its high ground clearance, offering neat, tidy, and confident handling. It’s excellent in tight corners and even has a “playful fun side”.
- Light Steering: The light steering makes lane changes effortless, parking easy, and overall city driving much less strenuous.
- Fuel Economy Feature: The engine features cylinder cut-off technology, activated in Eco mode under light throttle, which improves fuel economy. This is particularly helpful when fuel levels are low.
- Safety & Equipment: The Slavia offers a good sense of security and comes with a five-star safety rating. Apart from ADAS, it is considered reasonably well-equipped.
The Bad Bits: Areas for Improvement
While the Slavia excels in many areas, there are a few drawbacks to be aware of:
- Matte Paint Maintenance: The matte paint requires extra care; it’s crucial to instruct car washers to be very careful to avoid scratching the surface, especially when removing dried dirt or bird excrement.
- Tricky Boot Lid: The boot lid has a tendency to “whack you in the head” if not pushed all the way forward after opening.
- Mixed Interior Plastic Quality: Some interior plastics are described as “soft, creaky, flexible,” and not up to “Scoda’s international standard”.
- Subpar Digital Instrument Panel: The digital instrument panel is criticized as “terrible,” not well-designed, and very difficult to extract even essential information from easily.
- Weak AC Performance: The air conditioning is not powerful enough, especially during summer months, requiring high fan speeds to cool the cabin down, which is attributed to Skoda’s smaller compressor.
- Rear Seat for Three: While spacious, the rear seat is not great for three adults, particularly on long drives, with the center passenger often complaining.
- DSG Hesitation: The DSG transmission can exhibit some hesitation or jerkiness at low speeds or when starting from a standstill, with a noticeable pause before power delivery.
- Engine Noise: The engine becomes “pretty noisy” past 4,000 RPM.
- Variable Fuel Economy: Real-world fuel economy is between 10.8 kPL and 11.2 kPL, but this can rapidly worsen with frequent full-throttle use.
Conclusion: A Strong Contender
Despite a few minor gripes, the Skoda Slavia 1.5 TSI DSG is a strong contender. It offers a compelling package of power, performance, stability, and handling.
For those looking for an alternative in the 15 to 25 lakh price range, especially if considering an SUV, the Slavia is highlighted as a “better alternative” that should definitely be on your shortlist.