Skoda has a corporate vocational school Skoda Vocational School for Mechanical Engineering, which is located in the company's homeland - in the Czech Mladá Boleslav. Once a year, his students are trained to build a unique car based on a production model as part of their internship. The first such conversion was the Citigo-based CitiJet roadster introduced in 2014. This time, the students also decided to get rid of the roof, but they took the Skoda Scala hatchback as a basis.
The Scala is a compact five-door model that replaced the Rapid liftback in the European market in 2018. In general, this is a typical modern Skoda: practical and relatively budget. What kind of roadster is this?
The students drew inspiration from the 1957 Skoda 1100 OHC racing model. But how can a roadster turn out to be harmonious if it is made on the basis of a budget hatchback? And if at the same time you do not change the overall length of the car and its wheelbase at all? And if you also leave the standard front doors in place, and simply “weld” the rear doors into the body? It turns out that even with such compromise changes, the car can turn out to be very nice.
Instead of a roof and rear seats, a huge fairing is installed here. It provides two "humps" installed behind the driver's and passenger's seats. As a result, an image is formed in the spirit of expensive sports cars like the Ferrari 488 Spider.
To complete the image, 20-inch wheels were borrowed from the Kodiaq RS, which hardly fit into the openings. The brakes and hubs are from the Octavia RS.
Despite the overall interesting appearance, some elements are controversial even for the student level. For example, the panel behind the seats looks very rough: the rough leather trim and the protruding speakers of the audio system are more reminiscent of garage alterations from the 90s.
Technically, this is just Scala. A 150-horsepower 1.5-liter TSI engine and a 7-speed DSG “robot” are installed here. The students only made the exhaust sound a little more aggressive.
By the way, the project bears the name Slavia – that was the name of the brand of bicycles that Vaclav Klement and Vaclav Laurin produced at the dawn of cooperation. Later, they would work on cars, and then Laurin & Klement would be bought out by a conglomerate that was renamed Skoda in 1925. Today, the name Laurin & Klement is worn by top-end Skoda equipment.
Skoda introduced the Slavia roadster based on the Scala
