ŠKODA has built the 1,500,000th Octavia of the second generation. The anniversary vehicle – a white Octavia Combi of the ‘GreenLine’ version – rolled off the assembly line at the company’s main plant in Mladá Boleslav today. The figure above does not include the production numbers of the structurally identical vehicle “MingRui”, which is sold in China. The second generation Octavia has been manufactured since 2004.
“For the past 15 years, the Octavia has been the heart of the ŠKODA brand. It is a true ‘Simply Clever’ vehicle: Spacious, practical, family-friendly, and affordable,” says Michael Oeljeklaus, the ŠKODA board member for Production and Logistics. “The model has left an important mark on the rapid rise of our company since the nineties. In particular, the second generation built since 2004 has meant another leap forward for us. The figure of 1.5 million manufactured Octavia II expresses this success in a special way. The Octavia will continue to play a vitally important role in our model range in the future and make a central contribution to our Growth Strategy 2018,” according to Oeljeklaus.
More than any other model, the Octavia symbolizes the rise of the ŠKODA company as an internationally successful automobile manufacturer. The first Octavia of the “modern era” (Octavia I) rolled off the assembly line in 1996. With the launch of the second generation (Octavia II) in 2004, the manufacturer continued writing the success story of the compact vehicle.
The Octavia II sets standards with regard to quality, reliability, practicality, and price-performance ratio. The vehicle is available as a sedan as well as a station wagon; also, a vehicle with all-wheel drive and the sports version “RS” is being offered. Apart from that, the Octavia plays an important role for the continued development of electric mobility. With the Octavia Green E-Line, the Czech automobile manufacturer developed the first purely electrically powered vehicle of the brand. In a matter of weeks, a test fleet of eleven vehicles will commence trial operations in the Czech Republic in order for the company to collect practical experience with its electric drive.
The Octavia II is being produced or assembled in plants at Mladá Boleslav and Vrchlabí (Czech Republic), Kaluga (Russia), as well as Aurangabad (India), Usť-Kamenogorsk (Kazakhstan), Bratislava (Slovakia), and Solomonovo (Ukraine). Since the year 2007, the vehicle has been manufactured by Shanghai Volkswagen in China and sold under the name “MingRui”.