Styling
The bottom half of this Czechian camper is a Mk4.5 Skoda Octavia
vRS wagon in Moon White metallic; so far, so familiar. The difference visually, of course, is the large black square attached to its roof rack, which gives the game away as to what it is with a couple of huge white-and-orange 'Tentbox' logos on its front and rear faces. Other makes of roof tent are, of course, available, but if you see someone else in another make of car entirely with this brand of accommodation bolted to the top of their vehicle, be prepared for them flashing their headlights at you as you head towards them. Clearly, there's a Tentbox fraternity that you'll automatically become part of if you adopt one of these things.
Interior
The interior of the Octavia itself is, as you might expect, unchanged from the addition of the Tentbox. This is because KY25 OVT doesn't have a sunroof of any sort, so the tent atop the car isn't cutting out any light would normally enter the cabin.
Inside the Tentbox, meanwhile, is a surprisingly comfortable mattress liner that folds out with the tent itself and which, along with the outer base, can support 200kg of mass. So, er, if you're a bigger couple, perhaps check you're not going to overwhelm the Tentbox as you climb aboard. This reviewer circumnavigated this issue by bringing along our ten-year-old son for companionship, someone who weighs about the same as a very small cloud.
Practicality
Again, the car selected by Skoda is a canny choice. With a 640-litre boot, you can cram a lot of your gear into the back of the Octavia vRS Estate so that it still functions as a five-seater car, although don't try and get a quintet of people into the Tentbox unless you're all Borrowers. In which case, you shouldn't be driving a full-sized car in the first place. Ahem.
Anyway, for just a solitary night in the nearby Peak District for a middle-aged man and his son, somehow we managed to totally fill the Skoda's cargo area up with our associated clobber. Interestingly, there's a blue sister car to this white one on the UK fleet, which not only has the tent on the ceiling but also an EGOE box camping unit with slide-out kitchenette built into its boot floor. Skoda reckons that still allows for some storage space above it, so maybe we just need to work on our car-packing skills a bit more...
Performance
The car's performance is hardly dulled in a straight line, or it certainly doesn't appear to be from a subjective viewpoint, although it only managed 30.7mpg across 221 miles of reasonably gently driven mixed-roads testing - indicating the 50kg weight of the Tentbox Lite 2.0 and the increased aerodynamic drag factor it brings to the party do have a negative impact on the 2.0-litre turbocharged engine's rate of fuel consumption.
As to the tent itself, full marks: it goes from nought-to-erect (steady...) in about 300 seconds. Unpacking it is simply a case of unzipping three sides of the weatherproof casing and flipping that out of the way, and then using the built-in side ladder to lever the fixed base of the tent over. That'll need a little bit of strength, but it's a lot easier to get the Tentbox Lite to pop into position than it is faffing around with the supports and guy ropes of a two-man Vango when you're in the teeth of a gale.
You then insert six bendy metal hooks into holes in the side of the silvery frame of the Tentbox, push them up into six corresponding eyelets on the rain sheet, and voila - you've got a two-person tent in position, complete with convenient adjustable ladder to access it, in about five minutes max. For reference, when it's up the tent measures 133cm wide (that's actually front-to-back on the car, rather than side-to-side), 220cm long (the sleeping length, 110cm of which hangs over one side of the car) and 105cm high; it reduces to 110cm long and 25cm high when it's stashed away (the width, obviously, remains the same).
Ride & Handling
Mounting 50kg above the highest point of the car does have an impact on the Skoda's otherwise-excellent roadholding abilities because it naturally skews the centre-of-gravity. This vRS feels a little more ponderous into the bends, giving back a particularly unsettling sensation if you ask it to make flick-flack direction changes at speed. So, top tip here: don't. Oh, and it's a little noisier at motorway speeds as the wind ruffles around the Tentbox, although by the same token it's not a total refinement disaster in this regard either.
As to the comfort levels of the tent, it's again a glowing report. We managed to pick the one night in mid-September in which there was horizontal rain and gale-force winds, but we were nice and cosy and snug inside the Lite 2.0 all evening, despite the fact that gusts throughout the night felt like they were trying to rip the tent off the roof of the Octavia.
Another top tip, though: use the guy ropes provided with the D-clamps on the underside of the Tentbox's fold-out baseboard, and tie them around the spokes of your vehicle's alloys. If you don't and both occupants get out to go to the toilet, and the driver (*blushes*) has managed to park the car in such an orientation that the main opening of the tent, above the ladder, is facing into the prevailing winds (which just so happen to be wild and woolly on a vile September night in the Peaks), then you might come back from your sojourn to the public facilities to find the tent is now partially folded in half. Not ideal if it's pitch black, hammering it down with rain, and both you and your ten-year-old son are shivering in your nightclothes, trying to battle the storm as you desperately attempt to pull the tent back down into position with the ladder.
Don't... ask us how we know this.
Value
The Skoda in this spec is £41,070, because Moon White is a no-cost solid colour and the car didn't have Dynamic Chassis Control dampers either, so it's a 'standard' vRS. You get a lot of kit for your money, and one of our very favourite everyday practical performance cars going as well - but it's a shame the hot Skoda wagon's price can't start with a '3' instead.
As to the tent, it's £1,295 and if you're proficient with a set of spanners, it seems like you only need to tighten eight bolts on its metal crossbar clamps underneath to get it to fit. The tent comes with a welcome kit including the guy ropes, the six metal hook-bars for the rain cover, a built-in adjustable ladder, and a selection of zip-up windows and skylights in its body so you can open it up as you see fit, or batten down the hatches if the Derbyshire weather happens to turn completely foul. There are useful fabric pockets along the side walls inside and hooks on the ceiling from which you can hang an LED camping light, but items like fold-out chairs and tables to sit on are separate - Skoda put some of these neatly in the side-pockets of the Octavia's boot, but we never got to use them because we were huddling in the Tentbox to keep out of the driving rain.
Verdict
Skoda's research into holidaymaking habits showed that 36 per cent of drivers would take more spontaneous trips if they had a set-up like the Octavia-plus-Tentbox. Our overnight sampling of it proved that, yes, it's a great low-cost way of hitting the road without dropping a heck of a lot more cash on something like a
Volkswagen Grand California.
However, our handful of cautionary observations regarding this set-up would be these: one, it almost encourages one-night-stops on all campsites, because unless you take a second car with you, whenever you want to go somewhere in your vehicle then you've got to pack up your troubles in your old kitbag
every time, then unpack it all again when you get back to the site; two, with a traditional tent at ground level then you can use your vehicle to shield it from the wind, whereas the Tentbox is mounted up in the airflow like a blinkin' great sail; and three, and connected to the former point, perhaps avoid the top of the Peak District on a September night when the weather forecast is a shambles. Other than that, this Skoda-Tentbox duo is a very impressive combination indeed.
