Seat will soon be saying so-long to its carmaking business, its place in the VW empire taken by the Cupra brand that started as a badge applied to Seat’s hot hatches. Ten years from now, if Seat still exists at all, it will likely be known for urban mobility devices like scooters.
But there’s still a way to go before that happens. In the short term, it’s business as usual for the Spanish company, and that means it’s working up a facelifted version of its slant on the VW Golf, which is the Leon. The Leon name has been around since the late 1990s and the current one dates to 2020 when it adopted the same MQB Evo platform found under cars like the Mk8 Golf and fourth-generation Audi A3. Right now you can buy both Seat and Cupra versions of the Leon, but it’s possible that the facelifted version could only be offered in Cupra guise, despite Seat saying it will continue selling cars until nearer the end of the decade.
Our spy photographers have captured two different versions of next year’s revised Cupra Leon out testing, and though it’s a mid-life refresh rather than a clean-sheet overhaul, so there aren’t any major sheetmetal changes coming, that doesn’t mean you’ll struggle to tell the old and new cars apart. In fact, as facelifts go, the Leon appears to be getting some major surgery that involves grafting on the face from the Cupra Tavascan.
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The Tavascan, in case you need a nudge, is an electric SUV coupe from Cupra that’s the brand’s answer to the VW ID.5, and built from the same MEB platform. Obviously, none of the EV hardware will find its way onto the Leon, which will stick with four-cylinder combustion power.
But from the shape of the bumper visible beneath the disguise of this prototype, it looks like the Leon will at least resemble its Tavascan cousin, meaning it will lose the current Leon’s small grille and adopt a wide, black grille that stretches right across the bumper. And that’s not just us using our X-ray specs on the camouflage wrap. Cupra gave us a glimpse of the facelifted Leon when it rolled out the Tavascan as well as the refreshed Formentor and Born at an event in June 2022.
We’re expecting to see the revised Leon early next year and it will probably remain on sale through to 2028. Whether it survives after that, we’ll have to wait and see, and if it does, it will almost certainly be as an EV.
