The supremely practical Skoda Octavia Estate has always been one of our favourite family cars, but does the cheaper Vauxhall Astra Sports Tourer make more sense as a used buy? Read on to find out...
What will they cost?
New, the Astra was the cheaper car by quite a margin, and even allowing for our Target Price reductions at the time, it would still have been the cheaper of the two by more than £1000. Bought now as two-year-old cars, the Astra is still cheaper, by around £800. However, it will cost you more in the long run, due to its heavier expected depreciation and higher servicing and insurance costs.
The Astra has better on-paper official fuel consumption figures, but in our real-world tests the Octavia recorded a figure of 52.5mpg, against the Astra’s 51.6mpg.
Both the Astra Tech Line and the Octavia SE Business come with a sat-nav, a multi-function steering wheel, a DAB radio, Bluetooth and cruise control. Vauxhall only includes manual air-con on this trim, so you can’t set a specific, automatically maintained cabin temperature like you can in the climate control-equipped Octavia.
The Octavia also gets rear parking sensors, whereas the only way to get these on the Astra was to fork out around £450 on a pack that also brought with it front sensors. That said, the Astra gets dusk-sensing headlights as standard; they would have cost extra on the Octavia.
Keyword: Used test: Skoda Octavia Estate vs Vauxhall Astra Sports Tourer