Skoda Enyaq vRS Coupé review: Fast, practical and still hard to justify

Skoda’s electric flagship gains more power and range, but questions remain over the coupé SUV formula

The new Škoda Enyaq Coupé features a silhouette, panoramic glass roof, and up to 575km range.

SKODA ENYAQ COUPÉ
Rating	★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆
Price	from €48,535 - €64,990 as tested
Power	pure electric with a handsome 340bhp
Range	535km officially, but you can reasonably expect 475km
The Spec	top notch
Verdict	The fact it has a coupé bodystyle, lacks zing and is very expensive, are all downsides.

WE here at Examiner Motoring have never been fans of the coupé SUV.

Whatever one might think of the big, blocky, blighting-the-planet regular SUVs, the coupé versions are as useful as fluency in Serbo-Croat in Mullinavat.

Coupé cars are often silky, svelte, and sexy. But coupé SUVs?

They are big, bodacious, and as pretty as a bouquet of nettles.

Their popularity has always been something of a mystery to me. If you want a coupé, fair enough; if you want an SUV, that’s grand, too. But a coupé SUV? Nah.

SUV coupés do tend to be excellent to drive, but I always felt there was something inherently wrong about them; like a middle-aged man wearing Speedos while on holidays, in a display of bravura that’s well-intentioned, but mind-blowingly off kilter.

Oddly enough, the people responsible for all this are what used to be Ssangyong (now KGM), and the Korean’s Actyon model kicked off the phenomenon.

But it was BMW who gave the sports activity coupé credibility, back in 2008. It spawned copycats from almost every other manufacturer on the planet: Mercedes, Audi, (the whole VW Group, in fact); Citroen (the whole Stellantis group, in fact); Range Rover (the whole JLR group, in fact); and many others.

The concept, in my view, became a blight on the industry.

The Toyota C-HR (following on from the second-generation Lexus RX) came with a fastback-style, heavily sloped roof — as did the Nissan Ariya and several Teslas — but was never marketed as a coupé SUV. Perhaps they were too embarrassed.

Industry research indicates that buyers of the genre are four to five years younger than those who buy regular SUVs.

For the manufacturers, this has two benefits: First, it decreases any brand’s average age and increases desirability; and, second, buyers are less price sensitive, which means the car-maker can charge more without affecting sales.

The new Škoda Enyaq Coupé features a silhouette, panoramic glass roof, and up to 475km range.

An example of the latter point shows BMW charging $5,000 (€4,300) more in the US for the X6 than a comparably specified X5 SUV, increasing revenue despite the fact that it is the less popular model.

While the X6 (and its sibling X4) are both wonderful cars to drive, the main criticisms they face — along with every other SAC — are that they are way heavier than their wagon/hatch/coupé/saloon counterparts and offer less performance and poorer economic returns.

The lack of rear headroom and the reduced boot space also have to be factored in.

On top of all that, traditional coupés enjoy 2+2 seating layouts and have only two doors (usually frameless).

So, the coupé SUV concept has not curried widespread favour, apart, of course, from vain middle-agers who confirm the old Terry Pratchett maxim that ‘inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened’.

All of which brings us neatly on to this week’s tester, the Skoda Enyaq vRS coupé. As regular readers will know, Examiner Motoring has long been a cheerleader for the Czech brand and especially so since it got the keys to the kingdom by gaining access to the VW Group parts bin.

Since then, the company has consistently produced high-quality, sometimes ingenious, spacious, practical, and affordable cars, often embarrassingly similar to the products from Wolfsburg. So good was their output, across many segments and genres, I urged the management to use the brand to resuscitate VW’s fortunes in America in the wake of the horribly damaging ‘dieselgate’ scandal.

Whether it was because of Skoda’s ‘communist’ history behind the ‘iron curtain,’ or what, the company was never deemed suitable to win over Americans. That was a pity, because I think they’d have done a great job of it.

The vRS tag has been applied to many of Skoda’s models down the years, most notably the Octavia, and these souped-up versions of practical family automobiles have gained something of a cult following, both in petrol and diesel formats.

Attaching the vRS badge to an electric was perhaps something of a gamble, but it did so in 2022 with the Enyaq and, to be honest, it was a little ‘meh’.

It looked fantastic, came with some lurid colour schemes, had mega-aerodynamic wheels, and a grille that lit up, but wasn’t much better on performance than the regular one.

But the badge meant something to people, and it sold well; now, there’s a new one, and it comes in both coupé and regular SUV bodystyles — and it is faster, has a better range, looks more aggressive, and is slightly cheaper, although still expensive.

It has what the company calls a ‘tech deck face’, which adorns it with matrix LED lights and the illuminated grille.

The interior of the Skoda Enyaq Coupé has a well-worked infotainment system which does also utilise some buttons, situated under the air vents, which act as a shortcut for various functions, not least the climate controls.

Not much really has changed with regard to the exterior and the same could be said for the interior, although a wireless phone charger has been added.

That said, the interior is comfortable and is filled with recycled materials for the seats and most of the touch points.

The well-designed infotainment system utilises buttons under the air vents, which act as a shortcut for various functions, not least the climate controls.

THE Enyaq vRS is spacious, too, even in this coupé version, and taller punters will not feel too shortchanged by the sloping roof when sitting in the rear. There is decent headroom back there. The boot is still voluminous and you could nearly host an intimate club gig in it without fear of overcrowding.

Some 340bhp is produced by the twin electric motors, and there’s a creditable 540Nm of torque, providing an earthy 5.4 second, 0-100km/h time.

Somewhere along the line, however, Skoda lost sight of the need for driver engagement, and there is a distinct lack of that by comparison with other vRS models.

Sure, it handles well, largely thanks to the ‘dynamic chassis control’ (it just means the car has active damping) and the fact that the ride height has been lowered, too, but the steering is a tad woolly and, frankly, there doesn’t seem to be a vast difference between this and regular Enyaqs.

It does have plenty of get-up-and-go and will handle passing manoeuvres you wouldn’t dare try in lesser beasts, and the ride is excellent.

But there’s a lack of what might be termed ‘zing’ about the whole deal.

And then there’s the coupé styling. Now I know such matters are subjective and one man’s meat is another’s poison, but I just don’t see any appeal in these things. Some will, but I don’t. That it’s way more expensive than the regular model seems a bit misplaced, too.

Further, as the Elroq vRS matches it on performance and spec and is considerably cheaper, it makes me think that this is a rare misstep from Skoda, which in itself is something of a shock to the system and very uncharacteristic of an outfit that’s usually rock solid.