Used test: Skoda Octavia Estate vs Vauxhall Astra Sports Tourer
The supremely practical Skoda Octavia Estate has always been one of our favourite family cars, but does the cheaper Vauxhall Astra Sports Tourer make more sense as a used buy? Read on to find out...
What will they cost?
New, the Vauxhall Astra Sports Tourer was the cheaper car by quite a margin, and even allowing for our Target Price reductions at the time, it would still have been the cheaper of the two by more than £1000. Bought now as two-year-old cars, the Astra is still cheaper, by around £800. However, it will cost you more in the long run, due to its heavier expected depreciation and higher servicing and insurance costs.
The Astra has better on-paper official fuel consumption figures, but in our real-world tests the Skoda Octavia Estate recorded a figure of 52.5mpg, against the Astra's 51.6mpg.
Both the Astra Tech Line and the Octavia SE Business come with a sat-nav, a multi-function steering wheel, a DAB radio, Bluetooth and cruise control. Vauxhall only includes manual air-con on this trim, so you can’t set a specific, automatically maintained cabin temperature like you can in the climate control-equipped Skoda.
The Skoda Octavia Estate also gets rear parking sensors, whereas the only way to get these on the Astra was to fork out around £450 on a pack that also brought with it front sensors. That said, the Vauxhall Astra Sports Tourer gets dusk-sensing headlights as standard; they would have cost extra on the Octavia.
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