Skoda Enyaq iV 80 - long-term review

Unless you’ve been recently hiding on a remote island (don’t blame you to be honest) you may have noticed that for this season, F1 cars look different thanks to new rules. More slippery aerodynamics and downforce through the power of ground effects. More modern.

In fact if you compared these modern cars to an F1 car of the 1960s they are completely unrecognisable, a different species. But what’s this got to do with running a Skoda Enyaq?

Well, if you took those two F1 cars and drove them you’ll notice that they would drive completely different to each other, in fact you’d have to alter your driving style to get the maximum out of them. One would like to be slid through the corners in a drift. Try than in a modern F1 car and you’re in the wall. Turns out EV driving styles can also provoke disaster.

You see, I’ve been driving the Skoda all wrong. I’ve had to learn a new way of driving in order to get the maximum efficiency out of the range. After writing last month about how I wasn’t getting anywhere near the claimed range and copping some keyboard warrior criticism online that it was clearly my fault, I decided to ask our in-house eco range warrior Sam Burnett for some help.

For context this is the man who managed to get 400 miles from a claimed 308 in an Audi Q4 e-tron. Admittedly he did drive it around the Coventry ring road for 177 laps at glacial pace, but it was nonetheless impressive. Hero stuff, some might say.

I hadn’t been driving the Skoda in a lead foot kind of way. I wasn’t racing around as some might suggest. I was in fact what I thought driving how normal people do, but also being very eco sensible. But according to Sam, this isn’t enough. I was using regen (mode B on the world’s smallest gear selector) too much, and on the motorway which is counterintuitive as it's using too much energy to get back up to speed after.

I needed to coast more too. In fact the car tells me when to lift off and it will pretty much do 90 per cent of the work for you by using radars and map data when coming in to a speed limit change or a roundabout, braking and regenerating in the most efficient way.

And then when I’m in traffic, which is mainly in the country’s largest carpark called ‘London’ I can use B mode or deploy the paddles to alter the regen under braking, which in theory I guess is a little like using flappy paddles to change down the gearbox. It feels unnatural as you don’t get the physical sensation of a gear change.

And the result? Where I was regularly getting 180-200miles on a charge I’m now up to 250 miles and the range on the dash is pretty accurate (as long as I keep driving it in the same style). Of course milder weather will have helped too, but this lifestyle change has meant that I can now do my commute from Peterborough to London and back and not need to charge, or even panic that I might run out.

If I wanted to gain any more miles I would have to sit at 50mph on the motorway, but that is neither exciting nor how normal people drive. Well, unless your name is Sam. But alas, for the moment this is modern motoring. Not very exciting is it? Hopefully F1 on a Sunday afternoon can add a dollop of motoring thrills back into my life.

Yours truly,

A Chump