Seat León SC: Seat's hope at the Geneva Motor Show

We have followed the first three-door Seat León since its beginnings. We spotted it in an unusual place, at the Zaragoza Expo, almost three months ago, and we kept our ears open when Seat’s executives talked about it during the presentation of the Ibiza Cupra. Finally, the León SC has been unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show, what I will from now on call Seat’s “great hope”.

You will find the details on the León in a post by Chema from a few days ago, and you will see even more in a few hours, with more photos of the Seat models present at Palexpo. Otherwise, it has a character and a design that bears a strong resemblance to the Opel Astra GTC, a car I like very much. In turn, the SC has a promising future ahead of it against the Mégane, with a more accessible price range than the León Cupra. But the key is that this León offers a two-door that could be the key to preventing Seat’s future from being as bleak as it seems.

With its most iconic models (or at least those that were at some point) built outside Martorell and outside Spain, with so many German models now already manufactured here, and amid the disappearance of the Exeo (and possibly the Altea too), the León SC is a breath of fresh air, one of the first models to roll off the Martorell line on the new MQB platform, with which it will be playing “in the same league” as the Audi A3 or the new Volkswagen Golf. What is more, it has turned out to be the model about which James Muir himself has commented the following: the company’s great future bet is the new León, which must be the axis on which we will turn the company around.

I believe the future of the whole León range and what the Ibiza, together with the Toledo, can add will be decisive in the closure plans that have been circulating around Volkswagen for years. That same year, Ferdinand Piech wrote in his autobiography that Seat had three paths ahead: close down definitively, distribute all its employees among the other brands in the group, or close half of its factories. And this at a time when Skoda still did not have good products to overshadow Seat within the VAG Group.

Technical specifications of this car

HatchbackSEAT Leon68 versions · from 27,822 €