Seat's sports car plans on hold

Seat’s plans to launch its own sports car have been put on hold while it sorts out production capacity issues at its Martorell plant.

All Seat models bar the Alhambra are built at the factory and it is currently only running at 50 per cent capacity. A Seat source told Autocar that these issues would needed to be sorted out before new models, including a sports car and its Tribu concept, could be considered for production.

“A sports car is definitely something we’d like to do,” said the source, “but we need to get our volumes up and sell more of the cars we’ve already got before we start thinking about new models.”

The source said Seat’s new president, James Muir, who recently joined the firm from Mazda Europe, had the company at his disposal and developing more sports models was one direction the company could go.

“We’re a young, sporty and design-led brand,” said the source. “That’s what Seat stands for; in any sector we’re in, we want to be the sportiest, so something like a sports car makes sense for us.”