“The fact that the readers and customers of Auto Zeitung once again voted us best import brand is a great honour for the whole ŠKODA family,” says Bernhard Maier, ŠKODA CEO. In the course of our ongoing model campaign, we are making every effort to do justice to the trust placed in us.”
ŠKODA enjoys an excellent reputation among the readers and online users of Auto Zeitung: In this year’s ‘Auto Trophy’, they chose the traditional Czech brand as the best import brand overall for the seventh time after 2001, 2008, 2011 2013, 2014 and, 2015. ŠKODA, receiving 18.1% of the votes cast, went head to head against 35 competitors and won their fourth consecutive victory in this ranking.
The ŠKODA OCTAVIA is also among the repeat winners of the ‘Auto Trophy’. This year, with 17.9% of the votes cast, the model triumphed in the category ‘The best compact class – import’, thus repeating its success from the previous year; the ‘heart of the brand’ outranked 18 competitors. Over the last decade, the ŠKODA OCTAVIA has won five victories in various categories in the ‘Auto Trophy’. The result of the current reader poll also reflects the bestseller’s success in the registration statistics: In the first ten months of this year, the ŠKODA OCTAVIA achieved 48,593 new registrations in Germany. This means that the successful compact model is currently ranked ninth out of all new registrations in Germany, and remains the only import vehicle in the top ten new registrations of the Federal Motor Vehicle Authority (KBA).
This was the 29th year of polling conducted by ‘Auto Zeitung’. Since 2014, the ‘Auto Trophy’ has been added to the ‘World’s Best Cars’, as readers and online users of international auto trade magazines from the Bauer Media Group publishing house, including Auto Zeitung, can also participate in the vote. In total, some 60,000 participants cast their votes in 2016. In the German-speaking world, they selected their favourites in 17 categories, seven of which were international. The two categories ŠKODA won were selected in Germany.
In the past few years, it is not only ŠKODA’s bestseller that has retained the upper hand in the ‘Auto Trophy’: In 2013, the ŠKODA CITIGO and YETI won the coveted trophy in their respective categories for the second time in a row. In the same year, readers of the ‘Auto Zeitung’ voted the ŠKODA SUPERB winner of the import ranking. In 2012, ŠKODA also took three class victories with the models CITIGO, RAPID and YETI. In previous years, as well, the tradition Czech brand’s models were regularly on the winning stage.
