SKODA is aiming to inject more colour onto the motoring scene with two special editions of its smaller family models.

The Skoda Citigo Colour Edition and the Skoda Fabia Colour Edition both take away the pressures of trying to personalise your car - by doing the job for you.

And in both cases you get a variety of extra features at a bargain basement price.

On the £10,350 five-door Citigo Colour Edition, for example, you pay £855 more than for the Citigo SE that the model is based on but get £1,485 worth of additional features. If you want to keep the price down even more a three-door Citigo Colour Edition will cost you £9,990.

The Fabia Colour Edition at £14,870 costs an additional £540 more than the SE that it's based on but that buys you £1,045 worth of extra features.

On both Citigo and Fabia the upgrades are definitely cosmetic rather than practical but in both cases give the cars more kerb appeal.

The two-tone Fabia, for example, gets contrasting colours for the roof and the body as well as 16-inch coloured alloy wheels. The blue body with white roof version looks particularly striking.

Other little niceties include daytime running lights, tinted glass in the rear side windows and six loudspeakers.

The Citigo Colour Edition gets 15-inch black Auriga alloy wheels, body coloured door mirrors, front fog lights, tinted glass on the side windows and a Portable Infotainment System.

The Citigo is the ideal model for about town thanks to its compact dimensions which make it a park anywhere car.

Powered by a 1.0-litre, 60bhp engine it has a top speed of 99 miles per hour, and although its 0-62 mph time of 14.4 seconds sounds positively pedestrian it never really feels that slow in true traffic conditions.

In fact the throaty, three-cylinder engine always has a sense of businesslike urgency about it.

The little car buzzes along while just sipping fuel at the miserly rate of more than 62 miles per gallon.

If you are looking for a bit more space the 1.2-litre Fabia Colour Edition is one of the biggest superminis on the road yet will still average more than 60 mpg.

With 90bhp under the bonnet you get lively performance with a 0-62 acceleration time of a very respectable 10.9 seconds.

The gearbox on this model is one of the smoothest around but - like the Citigo - has only five rather than six gears.

On the move it's quiet, refined and comes well equipped with everything from air conditioning, cruise control and rear parking sensors to luggage hooks in the boot.

Sales of the Fabia together with Skoda's larger hatchback the Octavia now represent 55 per cent of the company's sales in the UK.

Sales of the Fabia alone are up 45 per cent in the last 12 months alone.

Some 25 years after it became part of the Volkswagen Group Skoda is ridding the crest of the wave with an 80 per cent increase in sales in the UK.

The company that has such a noble past - it dates back to 1895 - obviously now has a very secure future too.