Who is Skoda?

Mladá Boleslav, Bohemia, July 1894. A twenty-six-year-old bookseller called Václav Klement packs his bicycle into a crate and sends it by train to the repair branch of the German company that made it. The chain keeps coming loose. He writes to ask for the warranty work to be done, and he writes in Czech, because that is the language spoken in the town where the bicycle was sold. The reply comes back in German from the branch director, a Mr Foerster, and the gist of it is that if Klement would like an answer, he should write in a language they can understand.¹²

Klement is annoyed enough to go into the bicycle business. He finds a mechanic called Václav Laurin, who already builds bicycles in the nearby town of Turnov, and in 1895 the two of them start making their own under the name Slavia, after a Slavic goddess. Motorcycles follow in 1899. Cars follow in 1905. And in 1904, ten years after the first letter, Klement gets a second one from Mr Foerster. This time Seidel & Naumann would like a licence to build Slavia motorcycles under their own Germania badge. Klement, by now the company's director, says yes.¹²

That is the whole brand in one exchange of letters. A plain product, built to work, sold to people who were being overlooked, by a company that did not need to be sexy to win. A hundred and thirty years later it still sells cars that way, and in 2025 it sold more than a million of them.⁸

The bookseller and the mechanic

Mladá Boleslav is a small town an hour north of Prague, and in the 1890s it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which is why a bicycle company in Bohemia bought its parts from Dresden. Laurin was the engineer. Klement was the salesman, the bookkeeper and the man who wrote the letters. Their first motorcycle, with the engine on the handlebars driving the front wheel, cost Laurin a front tooth in an early crash. The ones that followed were good enough that the press credited the pair with building one of the first practical motorcycles, and good enough that the German firm that had snubbed Klement came back for a licence.²³²⁰

The Voiturette A of 1905 was the first car, a two-seater with a V-twin engine, and it sold well enough to establish Laurin & Klement at home and abroad. That same year the factory tripled in size and stopped making bicycles altogether, and from 1914 it was making armaments as well as cars, which is how most carmakers of the period survived.³²⁰

The winged arrow

The Škoda name belongs to a different company altogether. Emil Škoda was an engineer who bought a small machine works in Plzeň, in western Bohemia, in 1869 and turned it into one of the largest industrial groups in central Europe. Škoda Works built locomotives, turbines, bridges, brewery equipment and, in both world wars, a great deal of artillery. In 1925, with the car business short of capital after the war, Laurin & Klement was folded into Škoda Works, the Laurin & Klement badge came off the bonnet, and the winged arrow went on.³⁴

Say it SHKO-da, by the way. The little mark over the S is Czech for the "sh" sound, and most of the English-speaking world has been getting it wrong for a century.

The years that followed are the ones everybody half remembers. The factory did military work during the Second World War. After it, Czechoslovakia nationalised the car business and it spent four decades behind the Iron Curtain, building cars for people who had no other choice. In 1964 it launched the 1000 MB, a family saloon with the engine in the back, and that layout stayed in production, in various forms, for the next quarter of a century.³⁵

In the West those rear-engined cars became the punchline to a generation of jokes. The one Britain remembers is the Estelle, the name the 105 and 120 saloons were sold under there from 1976 to 1990, and the one most of the jokes were about.²² Some of that was snobbery. Some of it was earned. The cars were cheap, slow and built to a budget set in Prague rather than in the showroom. But they were also tough, simple to fix and sold in the tens of thousands to people who could not afford anything else, which is a sentence you could write about a Slavia bicycle.⁵

The last car Škoda designed on its own was the Favorit of 1987, a front-wheel-drive hatchback with a body by Bertone, the Italian studio that had drawn Lamborghinis. It was far better than the cars it replaced. It arrived two years before the Velvet Revolution, and by then the question was no longer whether Škoda could build a good car, but who would pay for the next one.⁶

Wolfsburg

After 1989 the Czechoslovak government went looking for a partner, and Volkswagen was the one it chose. The joint venture started on 16 April 1991 with Volkswagen holding thirty per cent, and the German company took full ownership in 2000. Škoda became the fourth brand of the Volkswagen Group, alongside Volkswagen, Audi and SEAT, and Wolfsburg, the German town where Volkswagen is based, began sending engineers, money and parts to Mladá Boleslav.³

The car that changed the brand's reputation was the Octavia of 1996. Underneath it was a Volkswagen Golf: same platform, same engines, same gearboxes. On top of it was a bigger, plainer, cheaper car with a much bigger boot. Buyers who had laughed at the Estelle a decade earlier noticed that they were getting Volkswagen engineering for less than Volkswagen money. The Octavia has been Škoda's best-selling car ever since, and it still was in 2025, with 190,300 delivered.⁷⁸

What Škoda added to the Volkswagen parts was a set of habits the company now calls Simply Clever. An umbrella in the driver's door, which arrived with the first Superb in 2001. An ice scraper inside the fuel flap, with a tyre tread gauge cut into it. A torch in the boot. A ticket holder on the windscreen pillar. More than sixty of them so far. None of them cost much, all of them are the kind of thing you notice in the second week of ownership, and together they gave a value brand a personality. The umbrella is still in the door of the Enyaq.²³¹⁸

A million cars

In 2025 Škoda delivered 1,043,900 cars, the most in its history, and for the first time it finished the year as the third best-selling car brand in Europe. A few years earlier it had been tenth.²¹ Revenue was 30.1 billion euros, also a record. The chief executive, Klaus Zellmer, has set the target of staying in Europe's top three to 2030.⁸⁹³

The electric cars are a big part of that. The Elroq, a compact electric SUV launched in late 2024, was the second best-selling electric car in Europe in 2025. The larger Enyaq, the car we reviewed, finished seventh. Both sit on the Volkswagen Group's MEB platform, the same bones as the Volkswagen ID.4 and the CUPRA Tavascan, and Škoda plans to double its electric line-up in 2026.⁸⁹

The story outside Europe is more mixed. India is a success: 70,600 cars in 2025, almost double the year before, built locally in Pune with models designed for the market. Vietnam is new: a factory in Quảng Ninh, built with the Thành Công group, which also assembles Hyundais there, started putting together the Slavia saloon and Kushaq SUV in early 2025 and is due to add an electric line, and the Enyaq, in 2026.⁸⁹¹¹

China is over. Škoda went in through the SAIC-Volkswagen joint venture in 2005 and at the 2018 peak sold 341,000 cars a year there, more than anywhere else on earth. By 2025 that had fallen to about 15,000, and in March 2026 the company said it would stop selling new cars in China by the middle of the year, keep the service network open for existing owners, and put the money into India and South-East Asia instead. The same pressure from BYD, Geely and the rest that is reshaping Singapore's showrooms emptied Škoda's in China.¹⁰

Leng Kee Road

Singapore has had three goes at Škoda, and the first two did not end well.

In 2002 the distributor of the day, a company called JTA Motors, lost the franchise while it was still holding deposits from more than thirty customers who had paid for cars they had not received. Škoda said the deposits were not its problem. The brand went quiet.¹²

It came back in 2009 under Harvest Automobile, part of the Group Exklusiv dealer group, which opened a showroom at 3 Leng Kee Road and launched the Superb and the Octavia there. That run ended too, quietly enough that when the brand came back again the local press called it a return.¹³

The third attempt is the one that stuck, and the difference is who runs it. On 22 March 2018 Volkswagen Group Singapore, the company that already imported Volkswagen here, opened a 940 square metre Škoda showroom at 26 Leng Kee Road, a few doors down from the old Harvest address, and started delivering cars that May. The launch line-up was the Rapid Spaceback, the Octavia, the Superb and the Karoq and Kodiaq SUVs, and for the first time the cars came straight from the factory in the Czech Republic rather than through a middleman. Ricky Tay, the managing director, said they could not have picked a better time to bring the brand back.¹⁴¹⁵

Four hundred and fifty-two cars went out in the first year, the best result Škoda had ever had in Singapore, and the Kodiaq was named OneShift's Car of the Year for 2018. The following year the brand sold 786 cars between January and November, enough to pass Renault, Citroën and SEAT.¹⁶¹⁷

Today the showroom sells the Kamiq, Octavia, Kodiaq and Superb with petrol engines, and two electric cars: the Elroq and the Enyaq. The facelifted Enyaq Sportline arrived in February 2026 at S$247,900 with COE, and the price had come down to S$230,900 by the autumn. Volkswagen Group Singapore sells Volkswagen and CUPRA from the same building, with its used-car business, Das Welt Auto, next door at number 24.¹⁸¹⁷¹⁹

What it is like to live with one

We spent a stretch of September 2026 with the Enyaq 60 Sportline Advanced. Our review found the easiest EV we had driven in a long time: pair your phone, pick a destination, drive. Quiet, roomy, comfortable, agile for its size, with real buttons under the screen, regen paddles on the wheel and four apps in the app drawer. We scored it 7.2 with a Soul score of 6, and the one thing we could not get past was a Cat B price that sits above the BYD Sealion 7.¹⁹

That is the Škoda problem in Singapore in one sentence. Everywhere else, the brand wins by being the sensible, well-built car that costs less than the badge it is built from. Here, with COE on top and a showroom full of newer brands selling bigger batteries for less, the Enyaq is the sensible, well-built car that costs more. The product is exactly what Klement would have built. The price is the one thing he would have argued with.

He would have recognised the rest of it, though. A company that was told to write in a language it could understand, and answered by building something better, is still sending the same letter. It just sends a million of them a year now.