Business review: Skoda Fabia GreenLine

In television adverts for the Skoda Fabia, a team of white-aproned bakers construct the car using sponge cake and icing sugar. The real thing is not exactly a confection to look at nor particularly sweet to drive - and the badge won’t be to everyone’s taste - but there is still a lot to like about Skoda’s smallest car.

For starters it’s cheap, roomy and practical. And in the latest GreenLine specification, it’s extremely economical too.

We tested the Skoda Fabia GreenLine estate, which is described as a supermini but offers much more interior space than most of its rivals. It costs from £12,145 on the road (the five-door hatchback is £11,495), boasts a cavernous 480-litre boot (300 litres in the hatch), and is powered by a 1.4-litre turbo-diesel engine.

This rather noisy powerplant sounded familiar as soon as it grumbled into life. Skoda is of course a brand of the Volkswagen Group, and the GreenLine Fabia shares an engine with the VW Polo BlueMotion we tested earlier this year.

We aren’t great fans of the Polo BlueMotion, judging it overpriced and overly compromised. The Fabia offers very similar fuel economy and manages to avoid one of the VW’s failings by offering good value for money, but it has not escaped the miserly Polo’s biggest pitfall: a very frustrating gearbox.

The notion behind Skoda’s GreenLine range is similar to that behind VW’s BlueMotion range or Ford’s Econetic line-up. Take a standard car, lower its suspension to reduce drag, modify air intakes, undertrays and bumpers to further clean up the air flow, fit skinny eco tyres, bung in the most economical diesel you have to hand, with a particulate filter to clean up soot, and stretch the gear ratios to cut the engine revs at a speed. And in the Fabia and Polo it’s the last of these changes that creates the problems.

In urban driving, you frequently need to travel at or around 30mph. In a normal diesel, this would be done in fourth gear. In the GreenLine, you will soon give up swapping between third and fourth. Around 30mph third gear is loud and not very economical, but fourth leaves the engine spluttering around the point of stalling. So third it is, with earplugs.

It’s a shame because otherwise the gearbox is nice to use, with a clean, positive action. And the rest of the Fabia GreenLine is easy to like too, providing you can see past the negative baggage of the Skoda badge.

It doesn't feel like a supermini inside.

You sit high on firm seats. The windscreen is pleasantly and old-fashionedly upright, reminding you how helpful it is to be able to see left and right at junctions. The interior plastics are good for the price. Minor and major controls are easy to find and use, marred only by flimsy-feeling stalks and ugly, hard-to-read dials. The fitted eight-speaker stereo is excellent and even boasts a socket for iPods. Aircon is standard, climate control an option. Ride quality is outstanding over smooth or rough roads. It’s no sports car, of course, with numb steering and feel-free brakes conspiring to make winding country roads a pain rather than a pleasure. But all-in-all it’s easy to see why Skoda scores highly in customer satisfaction surveys.

On the motorway the gearing is not such a problem, with 2,000rpm at 70mph in fifth gear giving the throaty diesel a cough-sweet. Turbo-diesel torque means you can even contemplate accelerating into the fast lane without dropping to fourth.

Miserly consumption is the GreenLine’s mission, however, and it achieved this in our 250 miles of mixed motoring, returning around 65 miles per gallon. The official combined cycle figure is 68.9mpg, and of course the economy on offer will vary a lot with driving style. We drove at a fairly leisurely pace, although acceleration is brisk in the lower gears when it’s needed.

After three years the Fabia GreenLine is likely to retain around half of its value. It sits in insurance group 3E and its official CO2 figure of 109g/km for both hatch and estate means tax band B and a modest £35 annual road tax this year, falling to £20 under the expanded VED banding in 2009.

All of which means that the GreenLine makes a great financial and environmental case for itself.

However, the GreenLine is a little more expensive than the slightly better-equipped Fabia 2, which in 1.4 TDI form turns in a still impressive CO2 score of 120g/km and costs just £11,290 for the five-door hatch. If it were our money, because of the GreenLine’s awkward gearbox, that’s the Fabia we’d put on our drive.