Hi my company car is due for a renewal its an old Octavia Vrs 180 03 reg 115,000 miles on the clock and without any problems.

So now I want to choose a new one, but which one?

My mate just brought a Saab 9-3 150Bhp Diesel and he says that the mid range acceleration is better with a diesel than a petrol.

I know from my experience on the motorway its normally TDIs up my ar*e so in the real world lets say upto 100mph and acceleraing from 50 which would be the quickest a 170TDI or 200 Petrol VRS ?

Use the gears, petrol. Surf the torque, diesel, but there ain't a lot in it. How do you drive?

We have a diesel and a petrol in the household so I consider myself fairly neutral on the subject. The best explanation I've ever read is here:

SEATCupra.net - Your #1 source for SEAT information - Power And Torque

The interesting bit is:

"Real Life Example

Assuming they are the same weight etc and each car is at peak-torque rpm, you can see that the VTEC will accelerate marginally harder in top than the TDI - despite its apparent torque deficit."

Allthough this may be true how fast will you have to be going ( for eg in a ctr) to be at peak torque in top gear?

IMHO it mainly comes down to whether you need the fuel economy or not, if not a modern petrol is very flexible, possibly more so than a (turbo) diesel.

Both are good engines in their own right, and if you stay < 100 mph most days it's too close to call unless you start from zero in which case the derv tends to get a proper roasting

(bit like me this morning but then that was a 4.2 liter Audi petrol vs 1.9PD derv - was kinda fun up to the point where I had to change to 4th where he was obviously just nailing it in 3rd )

Diesels do generally feel more torquey than normal petrols, but the vRS petrol feels very torquey due to the Turbo over a normally aspirated petrol engine. Plus the power band is very wide compared to a diesel, making it easier to drive. If you chip it, then it would have as much torque as a diesel.

Down sides of the petrol for a company car, is fuel consumption and tax. Both of which are worse on the mk2 vRS.

Thanks for your quick response.

Ive never had a diesel apart from the odd hire car abroad so I'm used to stirring the gears in the petrol. I think I prefer revs but I also like the torque that seems to push you along in a TDi.

Anyone know the in-gear acceleration times 50-70 etc ?

it's all in the octavia booklet.

I will say the PD170 has completely brutal torque spike, which i love.

Picked my 2.0TDI Elegance up from service repair yesterday and handed back 1.6FSI petrol. Got chatting to service manager and talked about possibly changing mine for the vRS TDI when the lease is up. He said don't bother the engine is not a patch on the 140BHP that I currently have. He says the 170BHP is too harsh to drive and not easy round town. In his own words stick to the one you have!!

Any comments?

The 170 has a reputation for being VERY spikey in torque delivery, you may be better off remapping the 140 instead?

It is true that the vrs tdi power does come in with a bit of a bang (not literally ) but you can work round it with no problem, it's just a case of getting used to it, the same as any new car you get used to it's behaviour over time, and it's actually quite fun, for me anyway., I've not driven the 140bhp version to compare though.

It's a piece of cake to drive round town or at low speed in my experience so i'm not sure what thats all about :confused: .

The 170 comes with the added bonus of a Diesel Particle Filter, all new technology & causing problems on some other Diesel cars although I havent heard of any yet on this model but saying that it hasnt been out long.

I suggest you get the infamous barge Pole out & discretely push that one into touch at the moment

dad replaced his mk1 vrs with the mk2 version. tax bracket is the same and the car is better on fuel especially if you fill it with the higher octane stuff (tesco 99 etc). 40mpg easy at motorway speeds. i'd try them both though!

Would agree definately drive them both.

On the PD140 theme a PD 140 with 17" wheels and sports suspension is a very nice car

Yesterday afternoon I did what you need to do! I spent it at the local Skoda dealer (Woodheads in Blackpool) and took their Petrol and then Diesel VRs demonstrators for a spin.

I prefered the diesel by a long way. In theory the petrol car should be faster but I found unless you were willing to rev it hard it wasn't a patch on the diesel. Driving along at 70mph in 5th or 6th gear and the diesel car would leave the petrol for dead unless you changed down a couple of gears in the petrol car. It covered ground with so much less effort.

More than that though the extra weight over the front wheels seemed to make the diesel handle better. It definately turned in better and the power steering didn't feel as over assisted as in the petrol car.

Throw in the fact that I did the same route in both cars and the petrol returned 29 mpg whilst the diesel did 38 and it became a no brainer.

Yes the diesel is a little noisier and a bit more expensive but I certainly prefered it.

Incidentally I had one of the old model Vrs's and swapped it for a new Subaru Impreza Sti in April, I didn't drive the new Vrs as I fancied a change. The under 20mpg habit is forcing a rethink.

That's my opinion but each to their own, you should find a good dealer and have a go in both cars.

One little thing though is that the derv won't tune up much, unlike the petrol one that can be fettled quite nicely. If you're gonna leave it standard though

One little thing though is that the derv won't tune up much, unlike the petrol one that can be fettled quite nicely. If you're gonna leave it standard though

With a DPF its questionable how much you can tweak the Diesel before you need to replace the complete exhaust with an after market one. The DPF is designed to catch all the soot & remapped Diesels can often smoke, also as it catches all the soot the tuner wont know if its smoking or not & therefore wont know if hes overworking the filter. Only time will tell if this is a real fear or not

On the PD140 theme a PD 140 with 17" wheels and sports suspension is a very nice car

I've driven a wide variety of petrol and several diesel cars, for nearly 30 years and currently have an OctaviaII 2.0 Tdi. Most of my cars have been VAGs.

I've always been an enthusiatic driver and am an engineering-and-science-type-of-guy.

For me, I have a 130 commute unfortunately, and the diesel I have is great for MPG and for motorway cruising at 80-85. If this is how your car will be used, then get the diesel. It works for the way I now use a car.

Depsite the car I currently own, which I'm quite fond of, I contest that for anyone who really appreciates cars, it's a no-brainer that petrol is toweringly superior. In terms of silken smoothness, wide power bands, and throttle respone, very few diesels can even hope to compete for a true car lover. They are still dirty (actually carcinogenic), noisy and peaky in power delivery

In my car, the handling is very obiviously marred by the car being far too nose heavy, although ultimate grip in a fixed radius is much the same as the petrol equivalent. Actually the ride on Octavia-II up to 7/10ths is very fine, but above that you find it's bland or even clumsy compared with better sorted cars. Steering vagueness in the straight ahead postion is annoying but increasingly common in cars, especially when you feel the electrical assistance start to build up that feels like a weird castoring effect. I digress, but if you don't know what I mean, there's not much point in worrying about fine details of petrol v. diesel.

I know that many of my friends with diesels, or even some petrol drivers that have been in my current car, would disagree, but I can tell you that I know that none of them has ever had a really fine petrol engine to make fair comparison. They generally are unable to express what separates a greta engine from a medicore one!

In mid-size affordable diesels your choices are the VAG 2.0 TDi, the Honda CDTi, or any BMW diesel if you can pay extra for the badge. I really don't think the PSA or Renaults are as good quality, engine-wise or as an overall proposition. Fords and GM have their merits, but they are mostly dull, and built ny accountants, not engineers (so why are they bust?).

For petrol engines, any BMW six, an Alfa six, maybe an Alfa 2.0 twinspark, the VAG 2.0T (or even the 20V 1.8T for lower budgets) are all engines that are fab compared with the usual dull stuff from the US giants, and obviously there are quite a few more expensive/bigger engines that are out there that are stunning. If you like motorbike revvy-ness and frightening people in the street VTECs are interesting, but not fo me.

So if you've read this far, the bottom line is buy the 2.0 TDi if you want fuel economy and nice m-way cruising, but no revs, spiky power band and unpleasant low speed noise. Buy a petrol 2.0 VRs if you you really want to drive, but have cash for petrol. Don't bother with any other Skoda variants but these two.

Thanks for all the posts.

I have a 140 round trip commute to the office, the tax man considers this to be personal mileage so It makes sense to take the companys offer of providing private fuel and paying the tax.

As far as I know the fuel tax is calculated on a figure of

For me, I have a 130 commute unfortunately

I have a 140 round trip commute to the office, the tax man considers this to be personal mileage

Blimey - I have a 100 mile cross country commute (I suspect the cross country bit makes the difference) which takes 2.5 hours on a good day - hence I end up staying away all week.

I can give you a direct comparison between the 140 TDi (my wife's octavia estate) and the 170 TDi in my Leon FR.

I agree entirely with the earlier poster who commented that you soon get used to the power spike in the 170 - the torque comes in very suddenly above 2000rpm, but you learn to use it and to love the push in the seat it gives you. People are always harking on about linear power delivery in modern diesels, but personally I love to feel the turbo working in this way.

By comparison, the Octavia feels much slower than my Leon, it doesn't have the same urge and the steering is slow by comparison. In fairness, it's a big estate versus a hatch, and on standard suspension and 16" wheels compared with sports suspension and 17s on the Leon. However, there is more torque at sub-turbo revs in the 140 than the 170, so it pulls better, say, in third gear between 20 and 30mph than the Leon. I've learnt to live with this in the Leon, but it was a big change from my old 1.9 110 TDi non-PD, which would happily pull along with no throttle from standstill in 1st and 2nd, where both the 140 and 170 struggle. So neither is as relaxing in stop-start traffic.

After 5k miles, my Leon averages 40mpg every tank consistently, and this has not changed significantly from new. It's not great, but I do use the car's performance, in all honesty it is very difficult not to. On motorway runs at 85 it will deliver 43mpg, where the Octavia will be giving 48.