Skoda Felicia: The Ultimate First Car?

Every day that I browse the wonderful world of CarThrottle, I see someone asking a question to do with the selection of their first car; some people have already got 200hp BMWs in their crosshairs, while others simply muster up a sentence with a price range, the attributes they seek and faith in the community for interesting answers. Those are just some of the reasons as to why I rarely ever chime in with my two cents, as my suggestion for the near-perfect first car is anything but a 330i or a MX-5.

My suggestion is the result of a long and very, very thorough search process; months before I’d even started driving lessons I was powering my way through AutoTrader and Compare The Market to find a ride that I could buy and insure myself, without my parents’ help and without depressing the petrolhead within me. Eventually, I did. And it also happened to be the most polite, cheeky and honest middle finger to all the people my age who are gifted with turquoise Vauxhall Corsas after passing their theory test second time lucky following weeks of expensive revision. A car that no average 17 year old with a shred of dignity or self-confidence would touch with a barge pole: The Skoda Felicia.

What first drew me toward the Felicia and away from the usual Clios, Fiestas, and even the ever-so-slightly left field Ibizas and Yarises was its understated quirkiness; little things like the inverted glove compartment, the lime green dials and the simple, clean bodyshape reminiscent somewhat of a MkII Golf. Another factor quite tempting about the Felicia was the fact that you could pick a good one up for the price of a Wham bar, which for a 17 year old working part time at a hand car wash centre, is amazing news. The fact that it’s not a Citroen Saxo means that insurance companies quite like the Felicia too.

So, one day, just a few hundred hours before my driving test, I went to a local scrapyard with my dad to get a replacement grille for his Vauxhall Omega, and by some form of luck/destiny, right by the entrance sat a clean, red, V-Reg Skoda Felicia LXi. Turns out the scrappie had it just come in a few hours beforehand from a woman who’d just been gifted a new car by her boyfriend, and he was genuinely having second thoughts about erasing it due to how clean and well kept it seemed and after a bit of good old English haggling, me and my dad managed to take it at 400 of my own pounds.

Fast forward 20 months & 20,000 miles and here we are. Now time for the actual ‘review’ of the car. I’ll start with the bad bits.
When it was brand spanking new my 1.3 Felicia allegedly had 68hp, which means that 15 years later, it now seems as if you can slip a decimal point in the middle of that original figure to have a realistic output. Long story short, it’s very slow. The turning circle is awful, bits of lacquer will peel off from jet washing, it’s rusty, the rear axle does what it pleases in the wet, the rear view mirror won’t ever stay in one place and on my birthday, after being filled to the brim with lovely Shell V-Power the offside driveshaft broke with absolutely no warning signs knocking on the door beforehand (pun very much intended) leaving me stranded and thus unable to attend my birthday party.

But what a brilliant car. The rattly little 1.3 OHV chain driven lump is quite weak, yes, but even if you floor it 75% of the time it’ll always give you 40mpg , the engine bay is spacious like the back seat of a Superb, which coupled with the simple 90’s mechanics means it’s super easy to work on, the standard strut brace makes for crisp, tidy handling (but still a splash of roll and a sprinkling of tyre squeal here and there), the driving position is spot on - you almost feel like you’re driving something a bit bigger, the rear seats offer more space than a Jaguar X-Type, it’s extremely well screwed together, despite cheap materials, even sitting at 80mph on the motorway it’s hushed with no excessive road or wind noise, the gearbox is direct, the visibility is glasshouse-esque and when you fold the seats down, the boot is flat and big . Oh and apart from the one incident with the driveshaft, absolutely nothing has gone wrong (…quietly knocks on wood)

In my fairly short time driving, a mere 20 months, I’ve covered about 5,000 miles in other cars, BMW M4s, Jag F-Types, or even more candid cars like a Mini Cooper S and Mazda MX-5s, and believe it or not, hardly any of them have come close to offering the same under-appreciated package of peculiarity, honesty and dependability as my £400 post-Communist shed.

So my message goes out to anyone in Europe looking for a first car, but especially to my fellow young petrolheads here in the UK, ever-blighted by ridiculous insurance costs; don’t spend your hard earned pound sterling on a cheap RWD overconfidencemobile or a pricey young MkV Polo - the Skoda Felicia is the ultimate first car.