‘World’s Worst Cars’ Book Redemption: Skoda Estelle

Look what I remembered: I said I’d do a daily feature, and a whole weekend passed, and here we are, on Monday, and somehow I remembered! It’s a cognitive miracle! And what did I remember? I remembered I need to redeem the poor cars picked to be in Craig Cheetham’s 2005 book The World’s Worst Cars! To do this, I have had an old Commodore PET computer randomly pick a page number, then I look up that page in my copy of  The World’s Worst Cars, which I maintain is more accurately a book of interesting cars. I then look at what the featured car was on that page, and do my best to try and convince you that the car shown there does not deserve this ignominy of being featured in a book called The World’s Worst Cars. Am I always right? Sure, why not? Who’s gonna say no, Craig Flipping Cheetham? Let’s go to the computer and pick a new page!

As you may recall, the method used to select what car to redeem from the book is highly sophisticated: I wrote a small BASIC program into my Commodore PET to pick a random number, which references a page number, and whatever car happens to be on that page is the car I redeem.

So here’s what we got today:

We got 60! A two-digit number, okay, that’s exciting. There’s under 100 of those, you know. And that car on page 60 is one I’m actually fond of, a rear-engined Škoda! The Estelle!

Are you familiar with the 1975 to 1991 Skoda Estelle referenced here, in this book of allegedly Worst Cars? Granted, the Czech-built Estelles were mostly known as dirt-cheap, bargain-basement cars from behind the Iron Curtain when they were sold in the UK, which seems to be the perspective Cheetham is bringing to the table here. They definitely were cheap; in 1980s UK, a Skoda Estelle was about £1,549, and other cheapskate cars like the Vauxhall Chevette were £1,842.

That’s equivalent to, uh, let’s do the math here, about £6,851 for the Skoda and £8,147 today. Which means in American FreedomDollars, the Skoda would be – woah, holy crap, just like $8,700! These cars were dirt.

I’m emphasizing this because a lot of the poor reputation Skodas had in the UK was because they were known to be some of the cheapest cars you could buy, and people shopping for the cheapest possible cars tend to not have a lot of money for maintenance and tend to use their cars pretty hard. And, even with that in mind, the Skodas really weren’t bad! They were real four-door sedans, they were roomy, relatively fuel efficient, had decent heaters, and good luggage space – these were really quite decent economy cars!

The engines were inline-fours, canted over at 45° to keep the rear deck low, and came in 1050cc (45 hp) and 1200cc (50 hp) variants, with the rally-spec version having a 1300cc engine making about 54 hp.

And yet, despite their bare-bones, bargain car market placement, these were technically interesting cars, too. They were rear-engined, which, yes, did mean that they were susceptible to oversteer, which would get you into trouble if you didn’t know what you were doing, but if you did, then you could corner faster, and, thanks to the Estelle’s other traits like rack-and-pinion steering and independent coil suspension all around, these things made shockingly potent rally cars, real giant killers, with results from, say, the 1981 European Touring Car Championships shaping up like this (for the Manufacturer’s Classification):

Look at that! Skoda, out on top, beating out – who is that? BM freaking W. And yes, they both had 140 points, but the Skoda had a better eighth result and something about the ex aequo rule something something.

So this little cheapest-car-you-can-get-shitbox is somehow a rally champion, and that somehow means it should be in the Worst Cars in the World book? The hell are you smoking, Craig?

The car was also just kind of cool. I mean, look at how the trunk opened:

Like a grand piano! And it was a pretty good-sized trunk, too. Look how many chubby, cherubic kids you can cram in there – what is that, ten? There’s ten in there!

Here’s a nice walkaround video that shows the odd trunk opening – which, admittedly, made more sense in LHD countries than RHD ones like the UK – and a lot of other details of the car:

Even in the World’s Worst Cars book Cheetham acknowledges that the Skoda was rugged and would last and was a generally decent machine. He complains about how it drove – mostly because of the rearward weight bias that’s part of pretty much any rear-engined car, like, say, a Porsche 911 that somehow does not show up in this book. That rearward bias also gave these cars great traction in snow and mud and other lousy surfaces.

I think it’s safe to say that the Estelles were some of the best Eastern Bloc cars you could buy in the west, more advanced in styling and design than, say, their Lada counterparts, and when you factor in the bargain price and impressive rallying chops, it’s really hard to understand why these cars ended up in Craig’s book. They’re not the worst of anything! Cheap, sure, probably a bit shoddy in some ways, maybe scary if you’re not used to a rear-engined car, but overall? A good, interesting, quirky workhorse. That’s not worst.

So, everyone, I implore you to open your copy of The World’s Worst Cars and tear out page 60.

Good.

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