Presumably Carlos Tavares sometimes travels. If the success-oriented boss of Peugeot and Citroën and Fiat and Opel looks at his own tough attempt to establish the DS brand in the automotive upper house, and then at Barcelona, it must seem Spanish to him. That is where a certain Wayne Griffiths stomps the Cupra brand out of the traditionally swampy Seat soil. Within the VW family, which appears increasingly brittle under its board of directors, the suffix standing for pleasure in performance has become fledged, and the procedure sometimes seems so lively as if nobody in Wolfsburg had been asked.
Holger Apple
Editor in business, responsible for “Technology and Motor”.
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The idea of overtaking Seat on the right in its own stable is just four years old. Since then, almost 200,000 Cupra have been delivered, and sales have increased from 430 million to 2.2 billion euros. The head of the company says nothing about profit, but he has goals, and tough ones at that. In the medium term, 500,000 cars are to be delivered each year. The range is currently grouped around the most successful model, the Formentor, an SUV in a dynamic dress that obviously suits the taste quite well. It will be joined in 2024 by the Terramar, an impressive 4.50-meter SUV similar to the Porsche Macan or Audi Q5, built in the Hungarian Audi plant and surprisingly conservatively drawn in view of its own claims, in which the word rebel appears again and again. It is fired in the classic way, so to speak, with combustion engines, also as a plug-in hybrid with an electric range of around 100 kilometers. At the end of 2024 it will be more rebellious and electric, then the Tavascan will follow, as of course already seen in a study in 2019. Even a revolution will probably take a while.