The list of equipment on this car would take up the better part of two pages and we wouldn’t even have started talking about the plush interiors or the 30-valve V6 motor and the tiptronic gearbox. This is one good car which becomes a great car if you take its price into consideration. And you don’t even have to drive it to believe this, says Yogendra Pratap as he discovers that there is so much more to the Skoda Superb than most luxury cars and if you want to compare it to the best, the only thing it doesn’t have is a three-pointed star.

The Skoda Superb is finally here. Although it might have taken it a year more than what we had predicted and though it now costs about four lakh rupees more than what we had thought it would, the luxury car segment of the country is in for a reshuffle with its arrival, much as we had predicted. We finally drove up to Aurangabad to pick up the car for a few days of rigorous testing and driving, not that the two are mutually exclusive. After having driven the Superb in the Czech Republic, I had, in the First Drive (October 2002) mentioned that on its advent to India, the Superb would give the big names a run not only for their money but also for their engines, space, comfort and luxury and the road test reveals just how and why it is going to happen.

But to understand what the Superb is all about one has to go into the genesis of the car. It was first launched way back in 1934 and its 6-cylinder 2.5-litre engine of those times produced a whopping 55hp, a figure that was achieved by cars like the Opel Kapitan only some 20 years later. Driven by the royal, rich and famous, the original Skoda Superb was a very successful car. The relaunch of the Superb brand in 2001 came at a time when Skoda was well established in Europe and had erased all the negatives that were associated with its name. The Czech populace, conveniently forgetting that Skoda Auto was a German company, took great pride in their domestic car maker and its cars in so much so that the president of the country wanted to use a Skoda as his official car. And thus was reborn the Superb! For the top Czech echelon to show off and be seen in a car bearing a Czech name. It should be simpler to understand the car now that one knows why it exists and for what it was made.