Skoda Kamiq review

Car prices have risen at a canter in recent years, so where the Kamiq kicked off comfortably below £20,000 on launch, it’s now grazing £25k (or over £200 a month) with the 114bhp engine you actually want.

Some of the jump can be put down to Skoda ditching the base S trim, its more demure 16in wheels and slimmer spec sheet clearly not bewitching buyers. Long gone are the days of Skoda being a value option – people are now happy spending proper money on one.

SE trim brings 17in wheels, LED lights, climate control, smartphone mirroring (on an eight-inch touchscreen), eight-inch digital dials and rear parking sensors. Upgrading to SE L spec adds another £2,265 or an additional £20 a month, bringing 18in wheels, plusher interior trim, ambient lighting, rear privacy glass and a few extra inches of display across its two screens – though it loses a few of the stereo’s physical controls in the process. You can’t have the 94bhp engine here, either.

The Kamiq Monte Carlo, meanwhile, brings a mild sprinkling of performance car cachet to a car that’s otherwise thriving because it’s ducked away from all that. Still, whether Skoda actually has a rally team nowadays feels moot when you see a Monte Carlo-trimmed car alongside its meeker brethren. The fancy alloys and copious black trim lift the tone nicely and go some way to step on the tones of more boldly styled crossovers.

It brings a decent uplift in equipment for its additional £2,100 over an SE L, too, with a heated wheel, LED Matrix headlights (perfect for a rally stage, of course…), new diamond-cut wheels crying out not to be kerbed and a reversing camera, as well as two-stage Sport Chassis Control that doesn’t bring a huge leap in handling prowess, but arguably helps appease those badges on its front flanks. It’s a bit superfluous here, but does no real harm.

Do they all come with safety nannies? 

But of course. Safety wise, the body shell is almost all high strength steel and you get Lane Assist, Front Assist, City Emergency Brake, Predictive Pedestrian Protection and Multi-Collision Brake all thrown in on the base model. Every time you prod the starter button, a speed limit warning bong and lane-keep function will activate.

Competition is tough and Korean rivals offer warranty packages that trump the Czechs’. But Skoda is a stalwart of high customer satisfaction when it comes to dealer surveys and brand loyalty. Perhaps it’s the free ice scraper in the filler cap (and soon that ventilated charger pad) that does it for them.