Say Hello To The New(ish) Skoda Octavia vRS

With the rest of the Octavia range recently receiving a little facelift, it’s now the turn of the hot vRS model. We ran a couple of the pre-update cars last year as longtermers and are big fans, so if Skoda has made it better, you can consider us interested.

It receives the same exterior tweaks as the boggo car, notably a new grille and a split headlamp design. Other than that you’ll find it hard to tell this apart from the old car, but hey, that’s modern facelifts for you.

Under the bonnet you’ll find an extra 10 horses to play with, giving a total of 227bhp in the petrol vRS, making 0-62mph possible in 6.8 seconds. The diesel’s 181bhp output meanwhile is unchanged from the outgoing car.

So far, so minor, but Skoda has made a few changes to the chassis. The rear track is now 30mm wider, and it drops the older XDS electronic differential lock - which uses small brake applications to reduced understeer - in favour of the fancier XDS+ system.

Speaking of differentials, there’s no mention of VW’s clever ‘VAQ’ electronically-controlled physical differential which was briefly available in the vRS 230, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see it make an appearance at a later stage.

We don’t know anything about pricing and on-sale dates just yet either, but expect that information to be released early next year.