THE Yeti, by tapping into Australia’s booming compact SUV segment, will really put Skoda on the map here and is expected to become its biggest seller next year, ahead of the 2013 arrival of a larger new Octavia and the Rapid small car positioned between it and the Fabia light car, plus the possibility of the VW Up-based CitiGo city-hatch.

Skoda took a team of journalists into the outback to prove its charming little Yeti is more than a jacked-up shopping trolley, reducing our time on the types of roads the customers will actually drive on, and the number of variants we could try was limited to just one.

The fact you are reading this now proves we made it back in one piece – as did the Yeti – but can this competitively-priced crossover from the Czech Republic stand out in Australia’s cut-throat compact SUV segment?