Skoda Octavia 1.9 TDi

Stare at the engine specs though and you’ll wonder what all the fuss and hoopla is about. A peak horsepower of merely 90bhp in a 1330 kilogram car is not in the least bit enticing or exciting. But this engine is not about power; it’s the torque that’s really interesting, all 21.4kgm of it. The diesel clatter however is quite prominent at idle with vibration filtering through the clutch pedal. Nudge the right pedal and it smoothens quite nicely.

What grabs your attention straightaway is an almost complete absence of turbo lag. The Octavia has as much as 20kgm of torque surging through to the front wheels from as low as 1800rpm, so at the gentlest of prods of the pedal has torque gushing through like someone’s opened the sluice gates of a dam.

Slicing through traffic now is just a flex of the right foot away, the abundance of so much torque at so low an engine speed does away with the inherent unresponsiveness of a diesel motor. In addition, the spot-on gearing comes to the Octavia’s assistance in this respect. 13.5 seconds to a 100k’s in a heavy diesel car is nothing to be ashamed of.

The stubby gear lever offers a slick and precise gearchange but you don’t need to use the ’box too often as the Octavia encourages a relaxed style of driving, mainly because the torque comes in so low and power tails off early. The Octavia is a great highway car, effortlessly chewing up kilometres and that gigantic wave of torque giving it devastating overtaking ability.

The fantastic bottom-end torque allows you to potter around town with minimal gearshifting. As a result, a figure of 12.7kpl in town is superb for such a large car. On long distances it gets even better with the average of our highway runs working out to 18.9kpl. In fact on one run with a light foot on the old Mumbai-Pune highway, the Octavia returned an unbelievable 21.3kpl!