Comprehensively revised Ateca SUV, puts Seat on ‘attack’ mode
Buoyed by significant sales increases in the lead up to the pandemic lockdown, highlights Iain Robertson, the notionally Iberian arm of the VW Group, Seat, is using the ‘return-to-work’ period to launch a series of model revisions, some of which are overdue.
Seat is an acronym. The letters stand for ‘Sociedad Espanola de Automoviles de Turismo’. In effect, the original Seat car company was established as a state manufacturing operation in 1950, when General Franco was in charge of Spain. With insufficient funds to build a car-making operation, the state sought an amicable relationship with a non-Spanish manufacturer. Fiat was the fortunate bidder and a series of Fiat-related Seat motorcars started to populate Spanish roads.
Following Franco’s demise and the end of his regime, Spain started looking more actively at developing its economy and prosperity that had been severely constricted. In 1982, an association commenced with the VW Group and the first melange products, like the original Ibiza hatchback, which featured Fiat underpinnings, a Porsche-designed engine and some VW parts, started to appear. By 1986, the VW deal was strengthened and Seat’s all-new VW-related cars went on sale soon afterwards.
When you appreciate that Seat is actually a relative newcomer as a car brand, its sometimes-shaky model launch programme is almost understandable. Yet, there have been times over the past four decades that conflict between Spain and Germany, in car terms, has been utterly inexcusable. At its peak, VW even sought to offload its troublesome Spanish subsidiary to the Fiat Group, notably Alfa Romeo. In some respects, it is fortunate that such a deal was not progressed, Fiat’s innate issues and relative lack of leadership at the time would have led to Seat’s existence being placed in jeopardy.
Since the turn of the Millennium, Seat has become markedly stronger as a brand and, even though its products are virtual replicas of models within the VW line-up, little snippets of Spanish character have been allowed to proliferate. There is a broader issue related to pricing policy, which is directed by the Volkswagen main board and has meant that both Seat and stablemate Skoda, previously regarded as ‘budget brands’, have been ‘normalised’ within the VW Group. Today, you can forget any prospects of VW-grade quality but with a bargain basement price tag…after all, VW has to settle its various ‘emissions cheats’ claims and its customers will pay for them!
Related directly to the VW Tiguan, the first Seat Ateca appeared as recently as 2016, quite late to market in SUV terms. Bearing only minimal styling changes, with the Seat benefits of standard air-con and slightly different trim details, it was a marginally less expensive route to the already well-developed SUV/crossover scene but its VW roots were more than blindingly obvious. Despite the badge-engineered aspects, Ateca has proven to be a highly popular car and more than 300,000 examples have found homes in just four years, 35,000 in the UK alone.
Intriguingly, it is not even built in Spain, as VW’s Czech plant, at Kvasiny, is home to Ateca. Despite Seat’s assertion of the car being designed in Barcelona, its styling team was not exactly ‘stretched’ by the challenge. Normally, at this stage in the model’s development, a series of minor upgrades would be announced, which they have been, but the overall design of Ateca has also been altered to reflect the fresher and more ‘pouty’ radiator grille and snout applied recently to the revised Seat Leon. It is a style direction shared interestingly with Skoda, in that the new Octavia model carries a similar, lower and more projecting radiator grille. Perhaps both brand’s styling teams cribbed from each other?
On the technology front, the revised Ateca is now fully connected, with online services and functions now being accessible through Seat Connect. Naturally, as with every new car being launched, vast improvements have been made to the ADAS package of passive and active safety and driver aids, which include predictive and adaptive cruise control, side and exit assist and front assist functions, complete with pre-crash autonomous braking.
The body revisions introduce a slight increase in length by 18mm to 4,391mm, although width (1,841mm) and height (1,615mm) are unchanged from the outgoing version. Just as Seat led the market originally with its LED headlamps, new versions illuminate the road ahead for Ateca, with a better spread of light and less scatter. At the other end of the car, its generous 510-litres of boot space (which can be almost trebled, when the rear seats are folded forwards) can be accessed through the hatchback, while the rear lamps are also fully LED and feature sequencing indicators on higher-specification models.
The customary trim levels of SE, SE Technology, FR, FR Sport and revised Xperience and Xperience Lux, both gaining from more focussed off-road addenda and a heated front screen, form the range and each trim boasts its own wheel design, ranging from 17.0 to 19.0-inch diameters. There are some minor changes to the FR trim levels, which gain grey mirror caps, accents and a slightly different grille, but the range colour palette is increased from the former eight to ten paint finishes, including a lovely solid blue colour.
Dependent on trim level, the centre-stack touchscreen can be either 8.25, or 9.2-inch in size, while the main, 10.25-inch customisable instrument panel ahead of the driver is also fully digitised (one of the major benefits of being able to dip into VW’s big parts bins). Having mentioned the enhanced connectivity, it is worth highlighting the speech recognition software, which responds to ‘Hola, Hola’ as an opening gambit and relies on more natural requests than previous systems.
Power comes from the usual VW line-up of petrol and diesel engines, commencing with the 107/112bhp versions of the 1.0-litre ‘triple’, 1.5-litre 147bhp ‘four’ and 2.0-litre 187bhp turbo-petrol engines, the latter driving all four wheels through a DSG gearbox. The turbo-diesels options are limited to 112 and 147bhp versions of the tried and trusted 2.0-litre engine. While many model mid-life refresher exercises tend to rely on minor details, those of the new Seat Ateca are more wholesale and illustrative of the renewed vigour within the brand. Its continued success is assured.
