Škoda Auto

We offer top-quality products and services--because we are always thinking of our customers. Our explicit goal is to not only meet customer expectations but to exceed them. This philosophy can also be seen and felt close up in the Skoda Auto Brand Experience. Whether in the new Skoda Auto Customer Centre, the Skoda Auto Museum in Mladá Boleslav, the future Skoda Pavilion in Wolfsburg's 'Autostadt' or the permanent exhibit on the Lindenkorso in Berlin, visitors will experience a unique symbiosis of the power of innovation and living tradition. And visitors to these centres will also find forums, which promote a dialog between Skoda Auto and its guests. Key Dates: The Skoda story begins the week of Christmas 1895. While carolers everywhere were celebrating Czechoslovakia's patron saint, King Wenceslas, a mechanic named Václav Laurin and a bookseller named Václav Klement began to make their first bicycles, adopting the brand name 'Slavia.' The Laurin & Klement company had progressed to motorcycle manufacture by 1899. Their first automobile, the Voiturette, appeared in 1905, with a V-2 engine producing seven horsepower. The company soon became, according to company literature, an international success. By 1910, a new model, the ENS, was boasting 50 horsepower. Laurin and Klement formed a joint stock company in 1907. The company merged with Skoda, a Pilsen industrial firm, in 1925, bringing an end to the Laurin & Klement brand. Production shifted to the Czech town of Mladá Boleslav. As early as 1930, the merged entity was known as the Skoda-Car Industry Joint-Stock Company. Its Skoda 420 model was marketed internationally after the Great Depression. During World War II, the Hermann-Göring-Werke group took over Skoda, and its production was directed towards the German military effort. During this time, its factory at Mladá Boleslav produced weapons and heavy vehicles. One of the vehicles was the Skoda RSO-Radschlepper OST, which featured a tractor constructed by Ferdinand Porsche. After the war, the car unit split from the Pilsen industrial concern whose name it shared while taking on the cumbersome Soviet title of Skoda AZNP (National Enterprise of Car Factories). It then became sole manufacturer of passenger cars in Czechoslovakia. Its Skoda 1101/1102 Tudor series was stylistically and technologically similar to the prewar Skoda 420. Designs such as the Skoda 1200, Spartak, Octavia, and Felicia graced the streets of Prague during the Cold War. (As its name hints, the Octavia was the company's eighth model.) However, during this time Skoda's technology began to lag behind that of the West, in spite of the introduction of a revamped model, the Skoda 781 Favorit, which replaced the Estelle, the butt of many auto jokes. Over a million Favorits would be produced in a new factory completed in 1987. In 1989, the last of the Estelles were brisk sellers in Britain due to their low sticker prices beginning at $5,390. As the Soviet Bloc crumbled, Skoda began to operate in a free market environment after 1989. Like most Soviet automobiles, Skoda's had problems with reliability, fit, and finish. In fact, the company removed its nameplate from its cars until 1993, when it introduced Volkswagen-inspired improvements in the Favorit. The Czech government felt the debt-laden company needed a foreign industrial partner to survive, and by the end of 1990 it had chosen Volkswagen to be that partner. Volkswagen simultaneously acquired co-ownership rights of the distinctive Skoda winged arrow logo, which had been the property of the Skoda Plzen engineering company since the end of World War II. The Czech government paid Skoda Plzen more than CZK 250 million ($8 million) for the right to have Volkswagen use the trademark on cars. (The logo was updated with new colors in 1993. The name 'Skoda Auto' was printed in white around a black circle, said to symbolize the company's long heritage. The green of the winged arrow within symbolized contemporar