Honda Accord vs Skoda Superb

What's the difference?

Will the new Honda Accord e:HEV RS topple the SUV throne? Unlikely, but it proves sedans can still haul the family around in relative comfort and style.

The new Accord drives stupidly well and offers great ongoing ownership costs, even if it's price tag is a little steep. It's hybrid powertrain also offers fantastic efficiency and that's a big win.

If you’re part of the endangered species who wants to continue to go against the crowd and pick a sedan or wagon over an SUV - the Superb is about as good as it gets without spending luxury car money.

It’s slick and classy, refined and practical, it’s dollops of fun on a curvy road, and more entertaining than its most direct rivals. Frankly, it’s hard to see why you shouldn’t look at the Superb if your budget stretches far enough for it.

Remember to check back in early 2025 closer to the Superb’s launch in Australia for our final verdict and some of the missing details, but for now this is one is worth keeping an eye out for.

Note: CarsGuide attended this event as a guest of the manufacturer, with travel, accommodation and meals provided.

The design for the new Accord is powerful with a sexy silhouette that features a rear spoiler, black accents and sporty 18-inch alloy wheels.

The old chunky grille is long gone and at certain angles you almost get a Nissan 200 SX vibe, which is gorgeously retro and a refreshing take for Honda - which has been playing it safe for the last few years.

The interior is simply styled but looks timeless. The dashboard has clean lines and a featured honeycomb mesh that hides the air-vents. It's a feature which might not land with everyone but it adds personality.

The black upholstery looks plush and there are enough soft-touchpoints to make the cabin feel like it deserves a premium tag.

There are numerous styling tweaks for the new-generation car, but at a distance it’s hardly a revolution from the outgoing version. Skoda sticks to a pretty conservative formula for its core range of vehicles.

In the metal and up-close, I reckon it looks fresh and understated, perhaps even a little stately with its extra length. After all, the Superb has a more important role to fill than ever before for the VW Group with the departure of the Passat.

Key changes include more sleek and compact light fittings, new wheel designs and a tweaked grille.

Inside, some of the most notable changes are the new screens and software, but there’s also a more elegant treatment for the dash, which uses an interesting pattern to cover the air vents and separate the upper and lower sections.

There’s also a notable increase in soft-touch materials. The brand also says 100 per cent of the textiles used in its new interior are made of recycled fibres.

New wheel and column-mounted switchgear helps keep the centre console clear, and key climate hardware makes a glorious return in a set of tidy multi-function dials.

Access to the cabin is great thanks to wide door apertures but the Accord is a low car to get in and out of with its 134mm ground clearance. Expect a couple of grunts when parked on a hill!

Both rows offer ample legroom but the front enjoys the best of the headroom. A 183cm (6.0ft) friend was lumped with the middle seat and spent the trip dreadfully hunched over and uncomfortable. Save the middle seat for kidlets.

The electric front seats offer decent comfort for a longer trip but it's disappointing that only the driver’s side gets lumbar support.  

The rear row enjoys well-padded seats and amenities, like retractable sunblinds, reading lights, two USB-C ports and directional air vents but it took a while for the back to cool down on hot days which my kid made known. Loudly. 

Storage consists of a large glove box and middle console (which can accommodate a small handbag), a sunglasses holder, four cupholders, four drink bottle holders and two map pockets. There is also a dedicated phone tray but a few extra cubbies up front would be welcomed.

The boot offers plenty of space with its 570-litre capacity, which is great for the class, and you can also open up storage options with the ski-port door, if need be. The powered boot release is a handy feature.

The touchscreen multimedia system looks nice but is a pain in the butt to use until you set some time aside to get to know it. It’s just not intuitive but the screen is responsive and it's a bonus that you get the built-in sat nav and Google apps. 

The new Accord gets wired and wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto but it took a few beats to get the wireless CarPlay to work.

The charging options are good throughout the car with four USB-C ports, two 12-volt sockets and a wireless charging pad to choose from.

For a start, The dials go a long way to making the interior much more pragmatic and functional, particularly for the driver, compared to almost every other VW Group product.

Not only do they provide physical hardware for ease of adjustment, you can also press them down to switch what they control. It’s even customisable via the centre screen if you don’t want to have to click through all the options all the time.

I’d go so far as to say the Skoda interior features are the best the brand has to offer. It features the best of the new stalks, screens, and touch-based light function buttons, without the inconvenience and distraction of the touch sliders which appear in VWs and Cupras.

Let’s also not forget the brand’s signature ‘simply clever’ touches, of which there are new ones. Yes, of course the umbrella is still hidden in the door, but there’s now also a little screen cleaning eraser block in the centre console (a genuinely great idea in the era of touchscreens which I’ve never seen before), a set of removable floating caddies in the armrest console (which Skoda refers to as the ‘Jumbo Box’ thanks to its 5.5-litre capacity), integrated rear window shades, Velcro cargo brackets in the boot and removable bins in the front door pockets.

The rear seat offers an enormous amount of room for myself behind my own driving position at 182cm tall, and there’s no shortage of leg and headroom. Unfortunately there is a raise in the floor to allow for all-wheel drive, making it squishy for an adult in that centre rear position.

Aside from the integrated window shades, the Superb also gets a set of three pockets on the backs of each front seat, mounting brackets for tablets or game consoles (great for kids) and a small touch panel on the back of the console for the rear climate zone.

There are also adjustable air vents and USB-C outlets for charging. Large bottle holders appear in each door, with a further two in the armrest, which also has a flip-out tray with a little phone holder.

The liftback still benefits from an impressive 645-litre luggage capacity, while the wagon balloons to 690 litres while adding that hatch opening back, larger and more useful than most mid-size SUVs.

Towing will be possible, although we don’t yet have figures for the new car, as it is subject to change in line with Australian design rules.

At the time of writing, it was too early to tell you what the final price-tag for Australian-delivered cars will be. We also don’t have exact local specification, although the brand has confirmed it will continue to only import a single high-grade Sportline for the next-gen car. It also said not to expect pricing to jump too far from the circa-$70,000 price-tag of the outgoing car.

What is new this time around? Expect an even nicer design on the inside, paired with a big jump in cabin tech.

The grade we tested for this review is the most similar car produced in Europe right now, equipped with leather seats with power adjust and heating, a 13-inch multimedia touchscreen with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto running a fresh user interface, a 10-inch digital dash cluster based on VW’s very good digital cockpit suite, tri-zone climate control, matrix LED headlights, as well as new adaptive suspension and drive modes.

It’s worth noting Australian cars will miss out on a handful of cool features available in the European market, like the connected services features which enable more detailed navigation. We also don’t expect to see mild hybrid or plug-in hybrid powertrains this time around, which feels like a shame.

There’s no question the Superb will be an expensive car, then, but it occupies a unique position in the Australian market. It’s larger and more luxurious than a Honda Accord, Hyundai Sonata, Mazda 6 or Toyota Camry, while competing on the price-front with luxury cars a size-down like the Lexus ES or Volvo S60.

Our test vehicle has an electric continuously variable transmission and features a new self-charging hybrid powertrain that couples two electric motors with a 2.0L, four-cylinder petrol engine that combine to produce 135kW of power and 335Nm of torque.

Only being available in one powertrain may limit its audience but the combo delivers decent performance for a sedan of this size.

Only one engine will be available in Australia, a 2.0-litre turbo-petrol four producing a punchy 195kW/400Nm, a slight upgrade on the outgoing car. It drives all four wheels via a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission.

Aside from this tweaked powertrain, the new car also has some structural enhancements thanks to its merging onto the new VW Group 'MQB Evo' platform which comes with tweaks to chassis rigidity, suspension, as well as new adaptive dampers.

The new hybrid powertrain means lower outputs and the official combined fuel cycle figure is just 4.3L/100km! Which is only beaten by the Toyota Camry's 4.0L/100km.

The on-test figure pops out at 5.1L/100km after doing a some urban stuff but mostly open-road driving. Which is where hybrids tend to be the least efficient, so the fuel usage is excellent.

Based on the official combined (urban/extra-urban) fuel cycle and 48L fuel tank, you should see a theoretical driving range of up to 1116km, which is a little less than the Toyota Camry but still an amazing range for a family car.

That range figure drops to around 940km using our real-world average consumption number.

We don’t have official figures for the Australian market, or even for this engine in the European market as it hasn’t started production yet (we tested 2.0-litre diesel AWD versions for this review).

Don’t expect it to stray too far from the roughly 8.0L/100km the outgoing car scores on the official combined (urban/extra-urban) cycle. The new engine will continue to require mid-shelf 95 RON unleaded petrol.

Power delivery for the new Accord is pretty punchy and, in most scenarios it’s responsiveness is great. But occasionally, when you’re getting up to speed, there can be a small lag before things kick in.

The Accord handles like a dream and feels firmly planted on the road in corners. Even in high winds, the car feels stable and sure of itself. Delightful.

The cabin is quiet and engine noise is at a minimum most of the time. Around town, the Accord sounds and behaves like an EV. Only once you hit the open road do you get some road noise but it never intrudes on chatting.

It might also be one of the easiest sedans to park and it's got a lot to do with the top-notch 360-degree view camera system and direct steering.

The Superb is just that when you get it out on the road. While it might look like a plain old sedan or wagon, it drives with quite some finesse.

For this test we weren’t able to sample the 195TSI 2.0-litre turbo-petrol which will come to our market. We drove a 2.0-litre diesel instead.

It still had quite a bit of get up and go, and we’ve driven the 195TSI in other vehicles to be confident enough to say it will remove the occasional turbo lag we experienced.

Regardless, some of the best changes to the Superb are in its suspension, steering and underpinnings. This is a tight, reactive car, with a confident long wheelbase, heaps of grip and sharp steering.

Unlike some smaller vehicles which share the same components, you can feel the Superb’s weight and breadth shift around a little more in the corners. But it does so with a pleasing amount of grace, and powers out of corners in such a way that it’s hard not to have a smile on your face.

This is a car which is pragmatic in the day-to-day, but also a dollop of fun on a curvy road. As you sit nice and low and feel a lot more connected to the road than you do in one of Skoda’s SUVs for example, the Superb is perfect for the ex-hot-hatch driver.

Ride-wise this big car proved very comfortable in our time with it. The suspension components have been upgraded for this new generation version, but so has chassis rigidity.

It’s hard to draw a definitive line through refinement, though, as the European roads on which we were testing our cars are much better sealed than Australian tarmac. Still the Superb soaked what few bumps were there up with ease.

There’s even a notable increase in refinement, thanks to acoustic lamination on the windows, and even the diesel version’s engine note was quite distant.

The drive experience here is hard to fault. Sure, this is a big car with a bit of weight to throw around, but it proved to be confident, graceful and comfortable, at least on the European roads we tested it on.

Expect the full array of active safety gear when the Superb lands down under, including freeway-speed auto emergency braking, lane keep assist, blind-spot monitoring, and rear cross-traffic alert. There’s also adaptive cruise control and traffic sign recognition.

The Superb is also equipped with an array of 10 airbags, and as the version which will land in Australia is built in the same plant as its European companions, there’s a higher chance its Euro NCAP maximum five-star rating will transfer across to an ANCAP assessment.

The Accord comes with a five-year/unlimited km warranty, and an eight-year battery warranty, which are now normal terms for the class.

You get a five-year capped priced servicing program and it costs just $199 per service, which is very competitive.

Servicing intervals could get annoying if you put a lot of kays on your car as they're set at every 12-months or 10,000km, whichever occurs first.

Expect Skoda to continue with its seven-year and unlimited kilometre warranty. It’s the first Euro brand to offer such a warranty, and hence moves the game forward and puts pressure on its most direct rivals to do the same.

Expect the usual pre-packaged service plans, although pricing and details will be revealed closer to the Superb’s launch window in 2025.