On the road: Skoda Yeti Black Edition – car review

The Skoda Yeti Black Edition is outlandishly ugly; it looks like a foreshortened hearse, and yet, despite the satisfyingly easy fold-down mechanism of the back seats, you could never fit a coffin in it. It’s like a Nietzschean embodiment of disutility. There is something about its bearing – the way it is imposing and businesslike, but utterly unglamorous – that gives it a bureaucratic air. I drove through chocolate-box Cotswolds towns, with endless names telling you what they are under and twixt, imagining myself part of a military convoy examining what was salvageable from a wrecked civilisation.

The mash-up with VW (two decades old, would you credit it?) has delivered a cockpit that is very Golf, with extra twiddly bits. An innovation I particularly liked was a second satnav screen above the speedo. However, the driver’s armrest is awkwardly close to the handbrake; a small but infuriating thing.

And yet, and yet; subjected to some profoundly challenging driving conditions, it triumphed, and I decided I didn’t care what it looked like, or where the armrest was. Wednesday was spent driving alongside a cyclist while someone else took photos of him on miles of country road, causing huge inconvenience to other cars. I needed more than agility, which this has in surprising amounts; I needed enough acceleration that meant, when I’d finished, I could disappear at a speed that said, simultaneously, “I’m sorry for the delay,” and “Eat my shorts”. That I got. Does turbo-diesel get better all the time, or do my prejudices simply recede? The 2L TDI engine soared past everything.

The next night I got caught in a snowstorm, flakes luminous in the headlights, like driving into a Maw Cluster in Star Wars. This is when you notice the Yeti is a 4x4, with its great traction and solid, unperturbed manoeuvrability. I may have been the fastest vehicle on the M1 (not, I underline, by breaking the speed limit; just because everyone else was chicken). And the day after that, Ikea. The tribulations of that journey aren’t so much in the driving as in the stopping and starting; this is when you notice your posture: how long would you be able to remain in the car before you felt as if your back were broken and your achilles tendons had snapped in sheer frustration? And the results, again, were difficult to fault. It’s roomy in the front and the back, and the reach is well designed.

I came round to this beast; it’s like having a bison or something. A bit of an eyesore for an urban vegetarian, but for the people who need what they’re packing, irreplaceable.

Skoda Yeti Black Edition

Price from £23,990 (as tested, £24,515)
Top speed 118mph
Combined fuel consumption 48.7mpg
Acceleration 0-62mph in 9.9 seconds
CO2 emissions 152g/km
Eco rating 6/10
Cool rating 3/10