• Impressively spacious interior for a compact car
• Plenty of room for four adults, well-shaped boot
• Light and bright cabin with good visibility

How much space is there?

Skoda’s cars are well known for their impressive practicality and the Kamiq is cut from that same cloth. It’s one of the most versatile small SUVs you can buy. While plenty of such cars have pretty generous interior space – including the VW T-Cross – the Kamiq beats the lot of them.

You don’t sit quite as high up as in the VW, but the Skoda is still taller than a regular hatchback – you sit 40mm higher up than you do in the Skoda Scala, for example. We found the Kamiq to be a very spacious car inside, despite its compact exterior dimensions, with plenty of head, knee and shoulder room in the front.

But it’s the rear seat space that really impresses, and what makes the Kamiq stand out in its class. There’s plentiful head room, and legroom is generous even when a six-foot tall passenger is sitting behind someone of the same height. In fact, the Kamiq has more space than some SUVs from the class above. 

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Our only complaint is that the relatively narrow cabin means seating three abreast in the back won’t be especially comfortable on longer distances. But that’s true of most other cars in this class.

The panoramic sunroof on top-spec Monte Carlo versions really brightens the interior, spanning nearly the full length of the roof. Plus, the sun blind retracts to the front to avoid stealing headroom in the back – a really neat touch we wish every car manufacturer applied.

Boot space and storage

The Kamiq impresses again with its boot space. It has 400 litres of capacity with the rear seats in place, but this expands to 1,395 litres with them seats folded. That’s not quite as much as the class-leading Ford Puma, and you don’t get sliding back seats as found in the Renault Captur. But it’s still a bigger, more useful boot than the vast majority of small SUVs and even mid-size hatchbacks. 

The loading lip is nice and low, helped by the car’s two-level boot floor, and you can even spec an electric tailgate. A particularly neat touch is the boot light which doubles as a removable torch for when you’re forced to clumsily sift through your cargo at night.

Elsewhere, you can have up to four USB-C ports (adapters for USB-A are available) to keep your devices charged. Nothing beats the Kamiq in this class for storage, either, with usefully cubbies dotted around the cabin. You can get it with an inbuilt door bin, while rear pockets in the front seats are ideal for smartphones. But our favourite feature is a luggage net built into the underside of the parcel shelf. It’s an ingenious idea for keeping small, loose items (such as tins of deicer or those tiny bottles of concentrated screenwash) secure without taking up precious boot space.

Is it easy to park?

The Kamiq’s compact size is a boon when driving around town. There’s a great view out of the front of the car, less so out of the rear (as is the norm, these days). But threading along narrow streets and slotting into parking spaces is easy. 

Parking sensors are fitted as standard, and a rear-view camera helps out with manoeuvres if you’re not feeling confident. An automatic parking system is available, but such things are more impressive in theory than in practice. There’s no option to have 360-degree cameras either, unlike a Nissan Juke, for example.

Safety

• Five-star Euro NCAP rating
• Plenty of driver assistance kit available
• Isofix on three passenger seats

The Kamiq received a full five-star rating when it was assessed by crash safety experts Euro NCAP back in 2019. It’s worth noting that the safety organisation’s tests have got tougher since then, so it might not hold up quite as well if retested today.

That said, its structure performs very well in a crash and it comes loaded with safety features including:

• Autonomous emergency braking with pedestrian detection
• Lane-keeping assist
• Traffic sign recognition
• Driver attention monitor
• Up to nine airbags
• Multi-collision brake – which prevents the car moving if there are multiple impacts
• Three Isofix child seat mounts (outer rear, front passenger seats)

You can also add to the kit list with items like adaptive cruise control, blindspot monitoring and rear cross-traffic alert, while standard-fit LED lights aid vision and visibility at night.

Watch: Skoda Kamiq SUV Euro NCAP crash test video