Skoda Enyaq iV Electric SUV has all-wheel drive – so we took it laning

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The moment you start talking about electric vehicles to a group of car fans (any group of car fans, from boy racers to off-roaders and everything else in between), you can be sure the subject will be met with a whole lot of negativity. Call it fear, call it wilful, call it narrow-mindedness, call it outright hate… whatever you call it, EVs still come up against a whole lot of resistance.

You may well be feeling it yourself right now. A story about green laning in a Skoda Enyaq iV, seriously? Yes, seriously. Electric propulsion is not just coming: it’s here. And though it might not yet have wrapped its arms around your own corner of the new car market, it will. The Defender is already a PHEV. The Wrangler is about to follow suit. More and more aftermarket EV conversions for oldshape Land Rovers are coming on stream. Get used to it.

We haven’t yet had a fully electric hardcore off-roader. It’s only a matter of time, though. But for now, let’s focus on the Enyaq iV. It’s our reigning Electric SUV of the Year. It’s very, very good. And unlike most

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The resistance people still feel towards electric vehicles may be shocking, but when we went green laning in a Skoda Enyaq iV we found it was more positive than terminal. In fact, this could be a whole new way to conduct yourself upon the surface of the earth…

Words: Olly Sack Pictures: Richard Hair

of its kind, it does actually have all-wheel drive. At least it does in the 80x SportLine form driven here.

You’re looking at a 265bhp, 313lbf.ft motor and a 77kWh battery pack, meaning 99mph up top, 6.9 seconds to 62 and a quoted range of 303 miles. You’re also looking at a ticket for £46,610, or £50,370 as tested.

A £50,370 Skoda. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the jokes. Q: What do you call a fifty grand Skoda? A: The company. And so on.

Obviously, those jokes are about as relevant to modern life as prog rock is to modern music. And in today’s new car market, fifty large is not actually all that much to pay for an SUV any more. You can spend a whole lot more to get less, at any rate. But the point is that Skoda makes high-quality, cutting-edge vehicles these days. And in the Enyaq iV 80x, it makes a vehicle that can hack it on the lanes.

Of course, this is not a death-andhell off-roader. We’re not talking about the sort of laning that trashes your paintwork or batters your sills, far less the kind that needs tyres and ground clearance tall enough

to cope with ruts made by a tractor. But a week or so before our Enyaq was due in on test, we set out a roadbook in East Leicestershire… and while the lanes were wet and muddy, they weren’t tight, rutted or overly rough. Exactly the sort of trails that make for a few hours’ quiet trundle, whether alone with your thoughts or on a family adventure with a difference. For most people, that’s what green laning is.

So we decided to go back to our roadbook and follow as much of it as possible in our Enyaq iV. There were one or two bits we knew we’d need to skip, to avoid scratching and miss out one deep ford, but by and large we reckoned the vehicle would be up to the challenge.

Obviously, the Enyaq iV is a symbol of the modern age – and one which, as we’ve noted above, some people want to resist. We don’t think those people have anything to worry about really, but the opposite may be the case with another symbol of the modern age. Our roadbook in East Leicestershire starts in the village of Stathern, outside the Red Lion Inn – which closed five years ago and since then has been the subject of a battle between developers wanting to cash in on the site for housing and local residents desperate to save part of their village that had been there since the 17th Century. There’s even a Red Lion Community Group campaigning to rescue it.

The irony is that it’s not even the only pub in the village. But we love the fact that the people of Stathern don’t want to lose it – and we’re also quite partial to the fact that it’s situated a few yards from the entry point to Toft’s Lane, which climbs a sharp escarpment before flattening out into the sort of firm, wide lane which, at the right time of the year, is a magnet for surface water.

Truth to tell, this is perhaps the toughest lane on the entire route. The ground gets quite rugged at the top of the climb, needing some very cautious line-planning to prevent it from catching the Enyaq underneath. It rides well over undulating terrain, but obviously there’s only so much ground clearance there and 235/50R20 tyres aren’t ever going to be at home in the rough.

Nonetheless, we’re not far into the roadbook before the Enyaq has shown its appetite for romping through the sort of peaks and troughs you get on a typical farmland lane. Not jagged crests or sheer-sided holes, but smoothedover ups and downs created by a regular pattern of agricultural use – which had filled up nicely with water in the weeks prior to our visit, something that’s always good for entertainment value.

If you’re used to green laning in a Jimny or a lifted 90, you’ll be used to the feeling of endless pitching that comes with terrain like this. It can be quite fun, but if a short wheelbase gets too much into phase with the crests and troughs you can find yourself being thrown up and down like a rider on a mechanical rodeo. Obviously, you’re no longer really in control of what’s going on by this point – meaning a vehicle with ground clearance to spare can actually be at risk on what should be very simple terrain.

There’s no threat of this kind to the Enyaq iV. Its wheelbase is nice and long, its centre of gravity is nice and low and it flows beautifully over the ground. It feels supple and well controlled. Naturally, going too fast would delete all the fun from the equation in an instant – but if you have any sympathy for your vehicle’s bodywork, that will never become an issue. Drive within the limits of common sense and it’s actually a very steady, very tractable ally on lanes like these.

Of course, you need to know the ground first. Taking a vehicle like this to go exploring would be inviting disaster. That’s why following this roadbook was ideal, not only because we had just set it out but because having recced it so recently in our up-for-anything Isuzu D-Max, not enough time had passed for the ground to change significantly. Of course, there’s always the danger of a lane being trashed by a tractor or forestry wagon, or for the local neds to turn up one night and wreak havoc in their MOT failures, but there’s only so much you can legislate for.

From Toft’s Lane, a long, well surfaced byway leads you across a

The Red Lion in Stathern hasn’t been turned into expensive houses yet, and if the villagers have their way it won’t be. There’s a Red Lion Community Group dedicated to saving the 17th Century hostelry – though last time it was actually open was more than half a decade ago, when electric cars were still a novelty

magnificently rich looking landscape of deep red soil and on towards Branston. This is one of those wonderfully bucolic villages full of stone built cottages, a traditional pub and a church with a steeple and a well kept graveyard adjoining the only street; there are many such places, and we shudder to think of how many swinger parties must have gone on behind those immaculately painted front doors and wisteria-clad walls, but each has its own quintessentially olde Englishe charm.

The unsurfaced road from here to Croxton Kerrial is quite charming, too. Not because it leads you past an olde English sewage works, but because it drops into a gentle valley whose bottom is a magnet for surface water. We’d have thought twice about risking it had the previous week’s recce not shown that it was shallow and firm underneath, but we needn’t have worried – again, the Enyaq sloshed through without a fuss, chucking up a bit of mud for good measure. Obviously, electricity and water don’t mix well, and that’s one reason why the deep ford further on in the roadbook was off limits, but no manufacturer is going to put out an electric 4x4 that’s not very well sealed indeed. With Skoda’s reputation for build quality, we were confident in what we were doing.

Talking of water, Croxton Water Spout is an odd sort of landmark. Croxton Kerrial is an ancient village with a slightly unfortunate twist, in that the main road running through the middle of it is the A607, so in addition to some quietly rural corners it has an ever-present stream of cars and trucks rumbling through it – and something they all pass, just to the west of the village, is an overhead pipe bringing water from the local spring. Part of a relict irrigation system, this was refurbished in 2003 – though you wouldn’t know to look at it, because since then the steady stream that used to flow from it seems to have dried to an algae-ridden drip. ‘Not drinking water,’ a sign says urgently, and you’d need to be very thirsty indeed to ignore it.

Just to the east of here, several sections of unsurfaced road make up a section of the Viking Way which used to be popular with green lane users. Sadly, these now have the almost inevitable blanket ban on them; we wouldn’t have gone near them in the Enyaq, as they were pretty rough underneath and potentially scratchy, but it’s never nice to see people having their rights taken away simply for wanting to use them.

Anyway, we pointed the Enyaq south towards Sproxton, another of those wonderfully English villages

Top: The trail from Branston to Croxton Kerrial is wide and well surfaced, though it’s very good at collecting surface water a little downhill from a sewage works. Nice… The stuff that comes out of Croxton Water Spout isn’t very pleasant either. Part of an ancient irrigation system, it’s fed by a local spring… but not a very active one anymore, it would appear

(this part of Leicestershire almost rivals the Cotswolds for the colour of its building stone). Sproxton rhymes with Croxton, by the way – though in each case, the ‘XT’ is pronounced like an ’S’.

Elsewhere in this part of the world, Groby is pronounced ‘Grooby.’ But Shoby is just Shoby. Pity, because we’d have gone out ourselves and built a village next to it called Doby.

There’s a network of lanes south-west of Sproxton which are, mainly, ideal for 4x4s with lower ground clearance, and once again the Enyaq gobbled them up with relish. It splashed through the shallow little ford in nearby Coston, too, without losing its footing on the slippery surface beneath the water – something we relate with feeling, because first time we ever drove it we were in an Isuzu Trooper whose part-time four-wheel drive led to it going completely sideways here.

Having ploughed through yet more surface water, we followed the bumpy King Street Lane uphill towards Sproxton Thorns then turned left on a byway through Strifts Plantation. This has been completely remade in recent years and is now entirely SUVfriendly, but it used to be a bit of a morass – inevitably, attracting the aforementioned headbangers who soon rendered it more or less impassable. You can still see deep, vehicle-wide troughs in the woodland adjoining the lane, which has now been blocked off to prevent a repeat, and this is a sobering reminder of how long our impact on the ground can last.

Not something that was lost on us as we glided silently past with the Enyaq’s electric motor taking the strain. Actually, it’s not as quiet as you might expect inside, as there’s plenty of tyre noise from those low-profile 20-inchers when you’re driving off-road, but from a bystander’s perspective you’d hardly notice it at all. Not that you’d notice a Defender going by with its Tdi engine turning over at barely above tickover, but this is an altogether different kind of quiet. And of course, while you expect to see things like Defenders on the lanes, a bright red electric Skoda is an altogether less common sight.

And we certainly did get a few looks, both around here (we’d been challenged the previous week in our D-Max by a farm worker who, mainly, wanted us to know he knew we were there, but in the Enyaq the same bloke just stared) and further on as we headed towards Burton Lazars on the wonderfully named Lag Lane.

To be honest, this should long ago have been renamed Fly Tippers Lane, because every time we’ve been there there’s been another lot of industrial junk dumped alongside it. Shame, because it’s a lane with beautiful views both east over Melton Mowbray and south over the rolling hills of rural Leicestershire.

Burton Lazars is another village with an odd name, but this one comes from a historical association with the Order of St Lazarus. The knightly order established a

No, it doesn’t have much in the way of axle articulation. Well, what were you expecting? The Enyaq iV does, in the other hand, deliver good traction in all sorts of grotty, grubby off-road conditions, and we chucked it at no end of water without it ever missing a beat

leprosy hospital here in the 12th Century, after which Burton became Burton St Lazarus; the natural sulphur spring in the village which attracted the knights also led to the establishment of an 18th Century bath house, but these days you see no evidence of such a storied history – save perhaps from the unsurfaced roads all around it, which would once have carried horse-drawn traffic to and from the mediaeval hospital.

Another little reminder there of how the ancient and the modern are blending so seamlessly in this story of green roads from centuries past and a vehicle brought from the future and into the present day. The Enyaq iV doesn’t have a lot in common with a horse-drawn cart, however – except, of course, that neither of them produces any tailpipe emissions.

And however different they might be, the joy of exploring the lanes and byways of the English countryside is very real, however you do it. Our D-Max made short work of these lanes the week previously on a diet of diesel: in the Enyaq, more circumspection may have been required but, when push comes to shove, it was every bit as enjoyable. And rather than filling up at a pump on the way home, we plugged in to a rapid charger at a local supermarket and brimmed its battery while doing our shopping.

You may well have a ‘yeah, but’ reaction to these words, and it may well be justified. You can point out (correctly) that running an old Defender is the ultimate in recycling, or you may wonder what the point is in trying to be gentle on the planet when they’re still digging new coal mines in China and everything we buy seems to be transported around the world on ships burning heavy oil.

Clearly, much has to change about these matters, and whether humankind has the intelligence to save itself from the consequences of its greed-fuelled madness is open to question. But by a strange coincidence, these words are issuing forth from the editorial fingertips on the day when Britain recorded its first ever 40-degree temperatures – and was there ever as clear a signal that we need to do something about the path we’re on?

For car drivers, the Enyaq is that something. It may not be the final answer to every off-roader’s needs – but every off-roader needs to be saved from what we’re doing to the planet, and it’s at least part of the answer to that.

And, if you love exploring the countryside but don’t always need to be finding a challenge in it to your sense of off-road machismo, it can provide an answer there, too. Electric vehicles do still come up against a lot of resistance, and few groups resist them more than off-roaders – but the Enyaq made it plain to us that we should have nothing to fear. It did everything we asked of it, and it did it all very well indeed – and for the first time ever, we went green laning without burning a scrap of fossil fuel. It won’t be the last.

Electric vehicles do still come up against a lot of resistance, and few groups resist them more than off-roaders – but the Enyaq made it plain to us that we should have nothing to fear