Even on passive dampers it rides well, and not to the detriment of handling: the steering is great and the whole car rotates quite nicely into bends. If you behave, this diesel will even do 60mpg on a run.
It’s one of very few cars where my ‘reviewer brain’ can switch off and I just enjoy the drive. My time with it has been perfectly timed with my house move. I let a removals firm do the heavy lifting, but the Superb came in very handy for runs back and forth to sign paperwork and to ferry smaller items from Kent to Oxfordshire. At an average of 53mpg,
I could do several of those 230-mile round trips on the same 66-litre tank. There’s not much more to it than ‘big, practical car is big and practical’. I’m not usually a fan of electric tailgates, because it’s quicker to open one manually, but here I was thankful for hands-free operation when loading the boot with boxes.
The only annoyance is that this car doesn’t have a variable-height boot floor, so there’s a step when you fold the rear seats. That unticked option box aside, I’m rather enjoying life with the Superb. I’m starting to see more of them on the road, too. It seems people are cottoning on to how good it is. A five-star car? I’d still say so.
Illya Verpraet
Update 5
Having somehow spent no time at all in the current-generation Superb, I’ve just put 1720 miles on our long-termer in a week. How did that happen? I’d initially planned to get the Eurostar to Paris to interview Renault Group CTO Philippe Krief, but then Aston told us it would be launching the Vantage Roadster in Salzburg later that same week.
The clear play, then, was to link the jobs by road: car beats train beats plane. I scanned the Autocar fleet for an accomplice. Prise the Bentayga from Rachel? Tempting. But the V8’s fuel economy might put the publisher out of business. Steve’s Wrangler? Similar story, only with ride quality as rough as a bear’s backside.
I thought Kris’s BMW 120 M Sport might be interesting, because these premium hatchbacks are now so grown-up that they’ve got decent touring chops. But then I remembered our 2.0 TDI Superb Estate, which put the matter to bed. A couple of months ago I drove the new Merc E450d Estate to the Alps.
