Motors - The Future of Seat

The Future of Seat 

The VW Group is an example of how a vast array of car companies can be under one umbrella and be extremely successful. With over 6.3 million cars produced in 2009 compared to Toyota’s 7.2 million and GM’s 6.5 million, the VW Automotive Group has risen to become a power house of the motoring industry and, according Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of the VW Group, they have the ambition to become the largest in the world by 2018.

And it’s not like the VW Group is a small, easy to manage group either, it has full, 100% share of 7 household names. These are:
Volkswagen, including the Commercial Vehicles arm,
Lamborghini,
Bugatti,
Bentley,
Seat,
Skoda,
and a 99.55%, so near-as-makes-no-difference 100%, share of Audi.

On top of all that, it owns 50% of Porsche, with a merger set to be completed this year, around 71% of Scania and recently acquired a 20% share of Suzuki.

As British Leyland has shown, owning and operating so many car companies who operate in similar areas of the car industry has it’s pitfalls. To date, of all the British names that went into the BL, around 40% of all British car manufacturers, only Jaguar, Land Rover and MG are left.

This is where VW had to be clever. The scale of the issue is immense, competing in VW’s own area is Audi, Skoda and Seat, all wanting their badge to go in the direction they want, price models as they wants and design chassis’, engines and bodies that will set them apart and this problem is where BL failed so spectacularly; the inability to juggle the wants and desires of so many car companies.

How ever, almost every marque that has fallen under the VW umbrella have thrived. VW has become almost a by-word for build quality, Skoda has been thoroughly transformed as a VW sub-brand, posting it’s best sales figures in it’s history in the last couple of years. Audi is able to match Mercedes Benz for perceived quality and class, Lamborghini has finally been able to put it’s reliability problems well and truly behind it and become hugely profitable, Bentley has turned itself into much more than a cheap Rolls-Royce and Bugatti has produced its first new model since production of the EB110 ended in 1995.

  However, Seat has been a trickier brand to get right. The problem is because Seat is a brand that is too strong to be a sub brand which has suited Skoda so well but lacks the perceived brand-quality of VW and Audi, so positioning Seat has been problematic. So what should VW do with Seat to turn it into something with purpose and direction of it’s own?

The answer to this can be found by drawing on Seat’s history. Seat has been involved in motor-sport and can trace that trend all the way back to the 1960’s and continued into rallying and more recently, World Touring Cars, under the direction of VW.

The problem is, none of this heritage transfers to the feel of Seat’s model range, you don’t know that Seat has been in the WTCC, in it’s current and previous form since 2002 and champions several times over and introduced Diesel engines into touring car racing. In short, Seat has no signature.

To demonstrate the problem, we look at Seat’s current model range:

Firstly, there is the VW Polo-based Ibiza, in various body forms. The Golf based Leon with the smattering of VW petrol and diesel engines. While both models have Hot-Hatch versions with the ‘Cupra’ badge and a black-fronted version with the Seat historical name ‘Bocanegra’. The problem is that even these hot versions are re-skins of other VW models.

In the case of the Ibiza; it is simply a VW Polo GTi, while the Leon uses the Golf GTi and a retuned Golf R engine for the Leon Cupra R and Bocanegra respectively.

The rest of the range is a rather anonymous collection comprising of the Altea mini-MPV which utilises the same platform as the Leon, as well as an Audi A4 based saloon and a large MPV which uses a stretched version of the Leon platform.

So like Alfa Romeo within Fiat, Seat wants to be a brand that focuses on sporty models but the demand of ensuring profitability prevents total commitment to this philosophy.

So what is the solution? Well in order for Seat to be able to breathe with the same design freedom as everyone else in under VW, it needs to differentiate itself, which means drawing on something that defines Seat. In this case, the WTCC is where you should look.

Mid-way through the 2007 World Touring Car Championship season, Seat debuted a version of it’s Leon touring car equipped with a 2.0l TDi engine. In the following season, the TDI Leon took both Driver and Manufacturer titles.

So Seat has not only a presence in production car racing but also, like Audi in Prototype racing, a history of pioneering Diesel engines. What am I suggesting? I’m suggesting that Seat moves away from away from selling models that simply sit in the price gap between Skoda and VW and bring something new to the VW Group stable, i.e. a focus on high performance cars, in particularly Diesel engined motors.

VW showed off the BlueSport TDI back in 2009, a working concept which, as you can see is a two-seat, mid-engined sports car that is designed to be VW’s version of a model that will also be sold by Audi, almost certainly with four-wheel-drive and a Porsche version that will feature a Porsche-designed flat-four engine rather than a diesel or traditional four cylinder engine.

If Seat were to take away the BlueSport and let it’s own famously whacky designers give it a distinctively Seat look, VW would be able to spread design and development costs even further and be able to price the VW version slightly higher, broadening the scope of the car.

Secondly I would have Seat take the Audi TT TDi and allow Seat to offer it as a front wheel drive version, something Audi refused to do.

This would give Seat two top end models that could be priced to give the Mazda MX-5 some real competition across it’s entire price point, rather than just at around £25k as the VW version of the BlueSport is expected to be priced.

I understand the need for ordinary models to keep the sales figures up, and, as with Alfa Romeo, Seat would need ordinary models such as the Altea and Alhanbra MPV’s and the Exeo saloon.

However, Seat is ignoring the serious motor-sport credentials of the Leon and in particular the talents of the TDI touring car. Currently, the Cupra R is difficult to distinguish from the rest of the range, and the Bocanegra is only separable by the deep black nose and for a company who prides itself on the madness of it’s designers, this situation is a little tame.

I would firstly take the idea of the Golf R; a unique Golf due to the fact it is the only Golf to utilise four-wheel-drive. In the case of the Leon, the top Cupra models should have almost a complete re-skin to really separate them from the necessary conventional models. Finally, I would add a third Leon Cupra model: A Cupra TDi to really push the success Seat have enjoyed with the Leon in touring car competitions. These changes to the range would allow Seat to show off it’s tradition of high performance production car racing.

It would also allow Seat to escape from the tag of simply selling re-badged VW’s. Badge engineering is nothing new, and nothing to be discouraged, Skoda is a transformed company because of rebadging. And while Seat would need to continue using VW base platforms for the Leon, the amount of extra development required to create a high performance and good handling diesel engined Hot-Hatch would ensure Seat’s technical ability would be fully demonstrated.

Seat also has a case for being allowed to produce some more original models as it owns it’s own factory in Martorell, Spain which currently produces all Seat models aside from the Alhambra, and so Seat is able to tailor the production facilities to it’s own particular needs. With these alterations to Seat’s model range, the brand would be able to continue it’s decent sales figures and add some really distinctive models that will really play on Seat’s history of being involved with high performance cars and will offer VW a reason to really push high performance TDi engines to try and claw back some of the advantage BMW diesel engines have over almost every other manufacturer.

In addition, Seat does really need these changes, while the cars are being sold, the company has never been in profit under VW, and while it doesn’t need the level of transformation that Skoda and Lamborghini have enjoyed under VW, Seat has been a member of the VW group since 1986, and for VW to hold on to the company for that length of time, it obviously doesn't consider Seat a liability.

MD