Automakers announce production milestones all the time. Some we take notice of, like when Lamborghini produces its thousandth super-what-have-you. The Skoda Superb, somewhat less so.
But a million vehicles is a million vehicles. And that’s one heck of a milestone, no matter what the car.
The Superb, for those (Americans) who live in markets where Skoda doesn’t compete, is the Czech brand’s flagship model. It’s basically a Volkswagen Passat, only bigger, with more space, different sheetmetal, and a typically lower sticker price all the same.
The name first appeared in 1934 on the Skoda 640 Superb. Its 2.5-liter inline-six was good for all of 55 horsepower, but the model encompassed some innovative features, like a driveshaft shaft running through a tube frame, and an advanced independent suspension.
Skoda only made 200 of those, so they’d hardly represent a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of production numbers. The real count, though, started in 2001 with the arrival of the first-generation Superb as we know it.
That original model yielded 136,100 vehicles before it was replaced by the MkII Superb, which saw an impressive 618,500 units produced between 2008 and 2015. Now two years since its introduction, Skoda has already made 250,000 of the third-generation model we know today. Add those up and we’re already past one million, which is pretty darn impressive, no matter which way you look at it.
It’s still not the brand’s most successful model, though: that falls to the smaller Octavia, which had already topped six million made as of last year.
The millionth Superb, in case you’re wondering, was a sedan spec’d in top-of-the-line Laurin & Klement trim, named after the two men (both named Vaclav if you can believe it) who founded the company 121 years ago.
If you told them then that their company would be producing motor cars by the million over a century later, they’d likely have scarcely believed it.
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