SEAT ATECA
Our road testers rate it but they haven’t had to live with it for six months. So what’s the verdict from someone who has?
The fact that the Seat Ateca was recognised as a ‘Game Changer’ at the 2017 Autocar Awards gives you an idea of how well regarded this compact SUV is at Autocar HQ.
But what was it like to live with for six months? It arrived in a 10-yearlong shadow of the Nissan Qashqai – the pioneer of this segment and often heralded the best on offer – so the Ateca had an awful lot to prove.
From the off, I liked its styling and it has stayed in my good books – it doesn’t set hearts on fire, but good proportions, clean lines and unassuming looks are exactly what I want in an everyday family car – even if I wouldn’t opt for red paint.
It was also a model that quickly became familiar – no getting used to the clutch or gearchanges over a few trips, as is the case in so many cars. The same applied to the infotainment system, especially the radio and Bluetooth, but more on that later.
I was happy with the 148bhp 2.0-litre diesel engine for quite a while – it wasn’t particularly noisy and had respectable acceleration – but after a few long motorway journeys, I found it sometimes lacked that final pull at moderate to high speeds. It was certainly manageable but not my engine of choice. If grunt is what you’re after, the same engine is available with 187bhp, but it’s the smaller engines that are most popular.
The Ateca’s 1.6-litre TDI diesel unit is the top seller, followed by the 1.0-litre TSI petrol, no doubt thanks to economy and pricing benefits. But the real cream of the crop in my opinion is the petrol-powered 148bhp 1.4-litre TSI. Jumping into this for a week amid my tenure in the 2.0-litre diesel was pure joy. It was, as you’d expect, nippier (doing 0-62mph in 8.5sec as opposed to 9.0sec), quieter (unsurprisingly) and generally more enjoyable to drive.
But while the 1.4 TSI might be my preference, my 2.0-litre diesel longterm test car had something else to offer: permanent four-wheel drive. I’d always suspected that few people need a four-wheel drive system on an Ateca when it is so well positioned as a practical family car, but a fifth of overall Ateca sales are 4x4s so there’s certainly a place for it in the line-up.
I’d hoped my trips to deepest, darkest Bedfordshire to see my parents through the winter months would give me ample chance to test the system, but with mild weather
Using the car as a daily driver is really where the Seat Ateca shines
ensuing, I opted for the next best thing: a Sunday of green-laning. Of course, the Ateca is no Land Rover Defender, but it coped well with some serious undulations as I edged forward in ‘off-road terrain mode’. I’m confident the Ateca could have done far more, too, if I hadn’t been so eager to return the car to Seat with its underside undamaged.
Inside, the Ateca offers everything you’d hope for from any Volkswagen Group family model. There’s plenty of practicality, with cubbyholes, easy Isofix points for my niece’s car seat and a boot that beats the Qashqai’s for size. It’s worth noting, though, that the standard 510 litres drops to 485 litres on four-wheel-drive versions. For my lifestyle, the boot divider net (£155) and double floor (£115) aren’t worth the money, but if you often load up your car with stuff, they might be worth considering.
Using the car as a daily driver is really where the Ateca shines. It’s comfortable, with a good driving position, and the infotainment system – seen widely across all VW Group cars to varying extents – is one of my favourites. It is instinctive to use, with an attractive and easy interface to access everything you need, including my varying taste in radio stations. Bluetooth has never been easier to use, either.
The Ateca also gave me a chance to regularly use Apple Carplay. There are some neat features, such as your phone knowing where home is. If you load Apple Maps in the car, it will automatically tell you how far away you are and give you a route (unless you’ve already inputted a route elsewhere). There were frustrations, though. One being that some popular apps were not fully compatible with Apple Carplay – notably, in my case, Google Maps, which I prefer to Apple’s equivalent.
Carrying on the making-life-easy theme, the Ateca has lots of useful extras. If you have your rear foglights on unnecessarily, it will tell you to turn them off, much to the benefit of other drivers on the road. If the car’s radar sensors aren’t working due to heavy rain or similar, the dashboard makes you aware.
The car, with some priced options (see ‘Test data’, above), is the doyenne of parking. I opted to rely on the parking sensors and top-view camera most of the time, but the far fancier option is so-called Park Assist 3.0, which both parallel and perpendicular parks on your behalf. I tested it a couple of times and it was faultless, but it’ll take a while for me to trust such a system to get into tight spaces on my crowded London road.
So did the Qashqai-rivalling model lose any of its appeal after six months as my daily car? In a word, no. Would I buy one? Yes. It ticks every box and secures Seat’s place in modern-day history as a seriously good car maker.