Skoda Superb Sportline 2019 first drive

But here's the thing. Once you get beyond to the unlikeliness of the idea of this car, it’d be easy to convince yourself that the reality of owning it, and driving it on a daily basis, could make sense.

The Superb is big; big on the outside, big on the inside (even by the standards of a lot of £40,000 saloons), conventionally laid out, solidly built (albeit a touch plain-looking in places) and persuasively comfortable. The Sportline derivative treatment doesn’t change any of that. It’s not one of those sporty options that misses out on boot space, or room for a spare wheel, for the sake of having a subwoofer because it’s mid-level trim; and so that gigantic 660-litre boot, rising to nearly 2000 litres with the seats folded, is present and correct – and is sufficiently cavernous to swallow more stuff than you’ll get in the back of most largish SUVs.

In the second row seats there’s room for even taller adults to stretch out, with the slight sense of narrowness-of-cockpit with which owners of previous-generation Superbs will be familiar having been banished at the last major model redesign.

Up front, the car’s driving position is fine – not particularly low, but all the more convenient-of-hip-point for daily use as a result of that – and the car’s sports seats offer a nice blend of everyday comfort, lateral support and understated material richness.

The 2.0-litre engine isn’t piped through the kind of sports exhaust made to attract attention, and if its audible note is digitally augmented by the car’s stereo when you use Sport driving mode, it isn’t made overly loud or contrived as a result. It’s just a really good engine: smooth and quiet when you want it to be, torquey when punting around, rangey and waspish when you’re in the mood, and – even here – ready to chip in with a high-30s-mpg economy return when you need one.

It’s got lots of mid-range punch but not so much that the accelerator pedal loses its linearity, and still feels nicely responsive and very willing to rev beyond 5000rpm. None of which is news: it’s just how the EA888 is. But you don’t have to drive many directly comparable engines from rival manufacturers to realise that it’s a rare combination of qualities.

It’s perfectly easy to drive the car smoothly because the controls make it so. Even in Sport mode, the Superb’s accelerator isn’t overly sensitive and its gearbox isn’t given to sudden unwanted downshifts.

But if you get stuck into the farther reaches of that powertrain’s performance, you’ll find plenty of appetite for speed. The car has all the traction it needs courtesy of its clutch-based four-wheel-drive system, taking off front T-junctions at full power without much more than a hint of wheelspin and very little power-on understeer. There’s A-road overtaking urge to spare whenever you want it, too, and more motorway grunt than anyone would be well-advised to deploy in 2019.

But it’s the Superb’s ride and handling that perhaps best characterise it. The sheer size of this car’s wheelbase, and its considerable width and bulk, would make it very challenging to endow with the agility and involvement of a first-order performance car – and very likely unrecognisable as a Superb if Skoda tried. Which is why it’s with some relief that you find out they haven’t tried that. They have, instead, simply made this car better-controlled, more accurate-handling, more assured and easier to drive at speed than other Superbs.

There’s a degree of extra lateral body control about the car, and a shade of extra handling urgency as you negotiate corners – but nothing you’d go so far as to describe as an incisive turn-in. The standard car’s tendency to heave and pitch when you tackle uneven surfaces has been dialled out, but Skoda’s stopped short of replacing it with a sense of untapped damping authority – because that’d only have made it less comfy-riding at the speeds it’ll mostly be driven. And so there’s just suppleness, and a sense of calm, level control, about the car over most A- and B-roads, with only sharper edges able to tease out a slightly short, hollow feel about the ride.