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Pros: Good looking, great interior, fast, quite efficient, sharp to drive
Cons: Boot’s a bit small, expensive, could have been harder edged
Skoda Elroq RS Design
The Elroq we already know. In fact, the mid-sized electric Skoda was Europe’s best-selling EV in April of this year, so it’s far from a stranger to our roads. It’s based on the same platform as the bigger Enyaq, but it’s a little lower, a lot shorter and closer to being a tall hatchback than an SUV.
To all of that Skoda has now added a deep dip in the RS bath. The Skoda RS name has been around for half-a-century and has evolved from rally- and race-winning rear-engined cars in the 1970s to slick high-performance road cars today. The Elroq RS looks the part — especially in the eye-watering Mamba Green paintwork — with a deeper front bumper that gets a chequered flag pattern, a deeper rear bumper with a diffuser-style element, a chunkier body kit, blacked-out badges and 20-inch (or optional 21-inch) alloy wheels.
The Elroq RS — green paintwork aside — doesn’t look all that aggressive, but then that’s the Skoda way. RS might be based in motorsport, but the road cars are all quite subtle, noticed only by enthusiasts, and with a pleasingly stealthy style.
Skoda Elroq RS Interior
As in the standard rear-wheel-drive Elroq, the interior might be the RS’s strongest point. For a start, it’s hugely practical, with loads of space for tall people both in the front and the rear. There are loads of handy storage spaces too, even if the boot — at 470 litres — isn’t all that big, and there’s no ‘frunk’ in the nose (although you can have, optionally, a handy net that hangs under the parcel shelf and which carries your charging cable).
There’s a good deal of style, too. The standard Elroq’s interior looks smart and is really well-made. The RS picks up from that point and adds in lots of synthetic suede (made from recycled plastics) which looks and feels terrific. This covers the dash, the doors and the brilliant high-backed bucket front seats. There’s also lots of lime-green contrast stitching — that green is Skoda’s signature RS colour. It’s a cabin that’s as classy as it is sporty.
There’s good tech on offer too. The standard 13-inch touchscreen is maybe a bit big for the cabin, but it’s fairly easy to use, backed up by some handy physical buttons on the dashboard. There’s an optional head-up display too, which projects your speed and navigation directions onto the windscreen, and Skoda has been working on its phone app too, adding a new charging payment function that, for a monthly fee, gets you discounts on public fast charging.
Skoda Elroq RS Performance & Drive
The standard Elroq gets a rear-mounted electric motor with either 170hp, 204hp or 286hp. This RS uses the 286hp rear-mounted motor, but has an extra motor in the front, giving the Elroq four-wheel drive and 340hp. There’s also lots of torque, with 545Nm for the rear motor, and an extra 134Nm from the front.
That gives this Elroq RS a fleet turn of speed, and it will hit 100km/h from rest in just 5.4 seconds, which is exceptionally quick for such a roomy family car. It brakes well too, thanks to uprated discs and calipers, but the brake pedal itself does feel a bit soft.
Through the corners, the Elroq RS’s lower, sportier suspension and standard adaptive dampers do a generally excellent job of mixing and matching tight control with a ride quality that deals well with poor surfaces. There is occasionally a bit of wheel ‘bobble’ from those big 21-inch rims as the suspension struggles a little to cope with the weight of the car (it’s a substantial 2.2 tonnes) but otherwise the Elroq RS feels impressively slick on the road, with good steering feel and surprising agility. Soften off the suspension as far as it will go, and it’s also very comfortable, although you’ll notice quite a bit of wind noise at motorway speeds.
The 79kWh battery gives a theoretical range of 549km, which is good for a powerful car such as this. In real-world conditions during our test drive in the Czech Republic we managed to return 20kWh/100km most of the time, and it seems likely that a range of around 460km is easily doable in mixed driving.
The battery also charges up quite quickly, at up to 185kW on DC outlets, meaning you can do a 10-80 per cent charge in as little as 26 minutes.
Skoda Elroq RS Pricing
The Elroq RS is, unsurprisingly, the most expensive model in the Elroq range, with an on-the-road price tag of €54,100. That’s a lot of money, but there are two mitigating factors. One: the RS comes with lots of standard equipment, including extra safety kit (rear side airbags are standard, something that a lot of cars leave on the options list) and two: the regular Elroq Sportline can easily be specified up to almost the RS’s price tag, so suddenly paying only slightly extra for the extra power and four-wheel drive seems almost sensible.
Carzone Verdict
The Elroq RS is a classic Skoda RS model in that it is fast, and it has good handling and steering, and some genuine motor racing heritage in its DNA. However, just as importantly, it’s a Skoda first and an RS second, so while it’s certainly fast, it’s also roomy, practical, really well-built and very comfortable too. Does that make it a little less thrilling behind the wheel than it might have been? Yes, a bit, but that doesn’t take away from the Elroq’s RS’s impressive balance of performance and practicality.