We tend to judge professional people on their willingness to take their own advice.
Should road testers have to prove that they've spent a significant sum on a car they've recommended as a requirement of some annual registration card, then? Should we give full transparency on what's on our driveways, so that readers can compare what we write with what we've actually bought?
Perhaps that would make it too easy to dismiss honest reviews - and indeed perfectly capable, trustworthy reviewers - for the wrong reasons. But for the moment I'd be in the clear, because I've just put some money where my big mouth is (or very recently was). It's not a totally unprecedented event, but the last time it happened was almost a decade ago, so I figured I could probably write about it without anyone assuming that I've won the lottery.
Our 11 March issue contained an eight-page group test of plug-in hybrid family SUVs, whose soporific effects you're hopefully over by now. It was won by the Skoda Kodiaq iV. And one of the very same has now taken up permanent residence on the Saunders family's block-paved driveway: a scarcely used Sportline in metallic Race Blue, supplied by Marshall Skoda of Milton Keynes. Light on options but with plenty of standard equipment, it would be a £48,500 car as a factory order today, and I paid £34,000 for it at nine months and 13,000 miles old.
I'm very happy with that, needless to say - and yet the story makes quite an interesting example of the slightly suboptimal state of new car buying in 2026, for several reasons.
First, it's not quite what I set out to buy. What I wanted was a Kodiaq iV with Dynamic Chassis Control, and this was the cheapest not-quite-year-old car in Skoda's main-dealer stock that had them. These adaptive dampers can be optioned on a lesser-trim model (which I'd rather have had) but very few owners go for them. Sportline cars get DCC as standard, though, so I've ended up buying a sporty-looking model because what I actually want is a comfier riding car. Which wasn't easy to explain to my other half, who assumed 'Sportline' was simply a sign of midlife crisis.
I mooched away from the showroom expecting to resolve to replace the standard 20in wheels with smaller ones with chunkier tyre sidewalls, but I'm pleased with how the car drives. The real-world 56-mile electric range that I wrote about in the aforementioned group test turns out to be true for my car. The adaptive dampers grant plenty of plushness to the ride. And the performance and refinement when the petrol engine is running are both good. So I'm giving the car high scores.
