A Snowman in Two Colours

“No need to take all this weight with you if you’re not off to the Himalayas,” he commented, hinting at what ŠKODA actually wanted to say through its latest concept car. Instead of a suit, he was wearing a pair of canvas trousers and a T-shirt, showing that the YETI was meant as a car for active people, a car that was practical both in city traffic and in rough outdoor conditions, but also a car that was free of the aggressive image of big off-roads.

The four-metre show car was a follow-up to the ROOMSTER, a previous concept. The A pillar was painted black to form a visually integrated “strip” with the windscreen and the side windows. The windscreen was sloped very moderately for the time, and the rear part was “cut off” sharply. The reasons for this solution were practical – the interior did not warm up excessively in hot weather, and the high-positioned roof offered generous space in the passenger compartment.

Shortly after crawling out of the “permafrost” in Geneva, the YETI went on to shake its roof in Frankfurt, where it was showcased as an unconventional pick-up truck. The car’s colour changed, too – the original icy blue was replaced with bright orange. The unique combination of a removable hardtop part of the roof and a retracting canvas part above the rear seats offered a variety of open-air options: since each of the two parts was independent, the driver and front-seat passenger could open the roof right above them or stay in the shade by converting the car into an open-rear pick-up. Users could also fold down both rear seats to create a flat surface similar to that seen in conventional pick-up trucks.

The hardtop above the front seats was a white-painted piece anchored into the top of the windscreen frame and the protective arches of the B-pillars. When released, the outer ends could be folded down on to the middle piece and the whole roof easily put into a pecial compartment at the bottom of the boot. The canvas part of the roof could either be wound back or removed completely. The whole system was co-developed with Karmann, the well-known German company.

When the tailgate was folded down, the gap the user would normally end up with was automatically covered with a pecial floor component to create a flat surface more than two metres long. The switch to control the rear wall was hidden in the letter “O” of the ŠKODA sign on the tail.

“The second YETI concept featured the ŠKODA name in letters on the tailgate instead of a logo, a solution that you can now see on our latest models. At that time, however, the name was embossed on the bodywork, which was not really technically feasible for mass production,” explains Jiří Hadaščok.