Skoda Enyaq Coupé vRS long-term test: report 7

The car Skoda Enyaq Coupé iV vRS Run by Allan Muir, managing editor

Why we’re running it To see whether the most stylish and powerful Skoda yet can justify its relatively high price

Needs to Live up to its sporty brief by being great fun to drive while still proving easy to live with and having a generous real-world range

Mileage 4744 List price £54,370 Target Price £53,430 Price as tested £54,990 Test range 265 miles Official range 323 miles

11 August 2023 – Them's the brakes

Like virtually all electric cars, my Skoda Enyaq Coupé vRS has a regenerative braking system, which not only ekes out range by sending energy back into the battery under deceleration but also actively helps to slow the car down. There’s a surprising number of ways of controlling the strength of the regen – arguably too many – but mostly it has been very effective in helping to make progress smooth and easy, especially around town.

For out-of-town driving, with the gear selector in ‘D’, you can let the car choose the level of regen automatically, based on its ability to read the road ahead and road signs it passes. However, this has turned out to be a mixed bag; it’ll slow the car quite aggressively as go from open-road speeds into a 50mph or 30mph zone, but half the time I want it to provide stronger deceleration than it does and have to resort to using the regular brakes. 

A more reliable bet is to shift manually via paddles behind the steering wheel, switching to the highest level of regen when I want to shed speed quickly on the approach to a corner, then back to a lower level (or none) as soon as the road straightens out. The only caveat is that the new setting is retained only briefly unless you’ve selected Sport driving mode (or have the motors set to Sport within the configurable Individual mode). With the car set up like this, it holds on to the chosen regen level until you tap a paddle again – as I prefer it. 

Around town, I default to using the constant-level ‘B’ mode, which is ideal for helping to control the car's speed while it's rolling along in slow-moving traffic, although I still have to hit the brakes to stop at junctions. It’s a shame there isn’t an even stronger ‘one-pedal’ mode capable of bringing the car swiftly to a halt just by lifting off the accelerator. As I discovered during my time with a Kia EV6 in 2022, this is particularly helpful in urban driving, and something I miss in the Enyaq.

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