FIRST REPORT
CUPRA LEON
LIVING WITH A… Where our long-term test cars have been and what they’ve done
Understated go-fast estate slips unnoticed onto the Autocar fleet
WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT With sports car pace and space for the dog, could this rapid wagon be the ultimate do-it-all daily driver?
“On paper, this is about as close as it gets to peak car”
Back in the gloomy days of Covid lockdowns, when most of our exposure to car company executives came courtesy of Skype or Zoom, we would occasionally be invited to fire up our laptops and join then Seat CEO Wayne Griffiths on a digitally imagined Spanish island to hear what he and his Cupra ‘rock stars’ had been working on lately.
There would be announcements about festival partnerships, tie-ups with fashion designers I’d never heard of and lots of chat about the metaverse. The messaging could sometimes be a little hard to follow – not least because it seemed quite at odds with Cupra’s billing as, you know, a car manufacturer. Here was a brand that started life as Seat’s sporting subdivision, then was hived off and quickly fleshed out with a line-up of generally decent warmed-up family cars – and which then started to present itself as a millennial-flavoured lifestyle brand-cum-fashion house.