Skoda’s upcoming 2020 Octavia is the latest in a
long line of VW Group products whose interiors have recently been caught on
camera, others being the next-gen Seat Leon as well as the all-new VW Golf. The fourth-generation Octavia
will ride on the same updated MQB architecture as the next Golf, Leon and Audi
A3, while sharing many of its turbocharged gasoline and diesel engines with its
platform siblings. We expect a full reveal at the 2019 Frankfurt Motor Show in
September.
After selling 388,200 units in 2018, the Octavia
stood out as Skoda’s best-selling model, which is impressive seen as how the
current 3rd-gen car has been out since 2013. However, this is of course good
news for the upcoming model, which should prove just as popular with the
masses.
Our main focus here is the interior of the 2020
Skoda Octavia, which features a digital gauge cluster, a large tablet-like
infotainment screen, push-down buttons on the center console aligned
horizontally, a stop-start button, electronic parking brake, and what appears
to be a small flap-like gear selector.
Of course, the big news is the screen layout, which
upon closer inspection actually looks more all-new VW Golf-ish than what we saw
in those recent Seat Leon scoop shots. The Leon’s infotainment display is fully
separated from the gauge cluster cover and sticks out like a typical
dashboard-mounted tablet, whereas the Golf’s layout sees both screens come
together a little bit more.
We seem to get more of the same with the Octavia,
although the light camouflage might be playing tricks on us. Still, if we had
to guess, we’d say that the screen layout is somewhere in-between what we saw
on the Golf and the Leon, where the infotainment display is not quite a
continuation of the gauge cluster screen, but also not fully separated, seen as
how it is positioned so far ahead of the cluster cover.
As for the exterior of this prototype, it’s meant to
fool us into thinking the car looks like a smaller Superb, which in a sense
might be true, but the grille is definitely fake and so are some of the body
panels.