Skoda Favorit classic car review: a misunderstood small car, or just a joke?
May 21, 2025 by Jamie Edkins
Car changing is a big deal
We’ve been given the chance to sample a 1991 Skoda Favorit, so is it as bad as all the jokes suggest? News editor Jamie Edkins has been finding out.
Skoda makes some of the best cars around these days. It has a great reputation for cavernous practicality, comfort, reliability and value for money, but it’s not always been this way.
Why do Skodas come with a heated rear window? To keep your hands warm while you’re pushing it. Someone goes into a scrapyard and asks for a hub cap for an old Skoda. “Sounds like a fair swap,” says the dealer. These were the sort of bad jokes which surrounded the Skoda brand in the 1980s and 90s.
To see just how far Skoda has come over the last few decades, I’ve been driving a 1991 Skoda Favorit – the Fabia’s great-grandparent, to see if it’s deserving of the mockery.
Skoda Favorit: specs and a quick history lesson
First things first though, what exactly is the Skoda Favorit? Well it’s a distant relative of the Fabia we know and love today.
It’s one of the last cars built by Skoda before Volkswagen took over and turned the brand’s fortunes around. The Favorit was replaced by the Felicia, which shared parts with the Volkswagen Polo of the day, and that was then replaced by the first-generation Fabia in 1999.
This Favorit is a Forum Plus model – meaning it has luxuries like front disk brakes, a three-speed fan and folding rear seats. These are things we take for granted nowadays, but gave the owner of this car some proper bragging rights in 1991.
Powering it is a 1.3-litre four-cylinder engine with a dizzying 56hp. There are no official 0-60mph times available, but I can confirm that it will do 60mph eventually.
Skoda Favorit review: design
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but having beheld the Favorit for a considerable length of time I can confirm that it’s not a pretty car. It’s not ugly per se, it’s just not been styled at all. It’s like the designers only had a ruler and a pencil to hand when sketching it out.
At the time this car was going up against the chic Peugeot 205 and the sporty Ford Fiesta, but I doubt anyone was buying the Favorit for the way it looked. It was an honest, practical and affordable car for people who didn’t really care about cars.
Skoda Favorit review: interior and practicality
It’s when you step inside that you start to realise where the jokes came from, because the Favorit doesn’t feel like a quality item inside. Some of the dashboard plastics feel akin to a wheelie bin, and the fit and finish isn’t great either.
I thought the indicator stalk was going to fall off at one point, and the same goes for the glovebox lid. I’ve been in Peugeots of this era and they feel quite a bit more solid inside.
Where the Favorit shines though is practicality, because it’s a really spacious small car. That flimsy lid gives way to an enormous glovebox, and this is one of the few classic cars which I fit in comfortably as a 6’3” adult with abnormally long legs.
There’s loads of space in the rear seats as well, and the boot is a good size. You quite often forget how spacious old cars are inside thanks to the lack of crash structures and airbags.
Skoda Favorit review: driving and performance
I don’t think I’ve smiled as much in a car this year as I did in the Favorit, because it’s hilarious.
The non-power-assisted steering is very heavy, but also quite vague. You get no real sense of what the wheels are doing beneath you, it just sort of wanders around the road and the steering wheel is just a polite suggestion of which way you’d like the car to go.
It’s also slow. Really slow. An esteemed colleague of mine has a 1993 Peugeot 106 with a non-turbocharged diesel engine, and I didn’t think cars could be more glacial than that. The Favorit gives it a run for its money on that front.
But that said, I really enjoyed my drive in the Skoda Favorit. It’s a charming old thing which can hold its own on the motorway, and it just makes you smile everywhere else. I was also expecting the gearshift to feel sloppy and disconnected, but it’s actually quite a sweet little gearbox.
Skoda Favorit review final verdict: is it actually a good car?
If you asked me back in 1991 to go out and buy a small car, I wouldn’t pick a Skoda Favorit. This is partially down to my own vanity; I couldn’t be seen driving something which, at the time, was the butt of so many jokes.
However, I don’t think the Favorit is deserving of said jokes. It was a bit of a watershed moment for Skoda, because it was one of the first cars it has made which was actually competitive. Compared to the Rapid or the Estelle which came before, this drives like a BMW. It was also practical, cheap to buy and well-equipped by the standards of the day.
The Favorit’s no-nonsense, practical spirit lives on in the modern Fabia, and it represented a turning point for Skoda as it started to shake off all the bad jokes which plagued the brand. No one’s mocking Skoda these days, because it’s making some of the best family cars you can buy.
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