Auto Express Crossover of the Year - Seat Ateca

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Seat have trimmed the international spec back for the UK giving only their menu choices and then in marketing terms allowed customers to crowd source their own concoction from the limited component parts. My beef is the enforced leather in the Xcellence which I've banged on about sufficient to irritate some ;). I have placed my order now reluctantly with leather as the only way to buy an Ateca in the UK with DSG in 4x4. No doubt they will bring a cloth option out now to irritate my purchase. I see you can get kiddy covers as accessories from Seat, may be forced into that if I get fed up with sitting on leather.

On all of this lack of choice thing from Seat UK I wondered whether it was due to PCP contracts that Seat just offer limited menu choices for pricing up ?. I don't buy cars on PCP but I reckon the PCP guys lead to the effect of Seat UK just reducing the options. Certainly I was told by one large dealer in the north we never sell Seat sound systems, we only get sent what Seat knows we can sell. Another dealer has only a very limited selection of low spec cars in their show room. Basically the more fancy stuff as a private cash buyer you wouldn't find in the showrooms, I didn't when I wanted to test out the more advanced navigation systems on other Seat models. Seemed to me a bit self perpetuating that Seat won't sell top spec cars if they never put them in their showrooms.

There is something going on with their business model and marketing that they need to address. I'm sure it's that they are pandering to the PCP market which is the centre ground of cars and on a spec price comparison. So a bit irritating for a cash buyer that you can't buy the car you want since the model choice has been reduced in the UK by Seat UK. You get the feeling that Seat knows best rather than the customer rules.
 
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rambalad

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Nov 1, 2013
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Merseyside
My Leon was an ex-demo with all the bells and whistles including SeatSound so it will be interesting to see what they make their dealers stock at first. I cant see SUK changing their line up before I need to change, so it will be down to a choice between what spec Motorpoint manage to import from Ireland or go for an Audi Q2. Did you get any discount? I had an email today from DTD that was giving unbelievable discounts on the Leon.
 

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I was interested in the models for Ireland in case they escaped the leather only mandate that the UK has on the Xcellence. Well they do brown or black, one up from the UK, but not without leather. Then they have the cappuccino colour which the UK doesn't have. I expected SUK won't be changing the line up too soon unless they find they don't sell but them, opinion is that they will, least in Europe so they might not be chasing them that hard.

I had a long piece of text on the other board on the decision on whether to hold or wait. I might be wrong, but my logic is that those 10 percent currency pressures will come through onto car prices whether you see them or not. Thus if you were looking for a 10 percent discount on an Ateca six months down the line from September you wouldn't see it since it would be swallowed up in the currency cost pressures give or take a month either side. Clearly it will be putting pressure on their expected bottom line as an importer, their UK overheads which might not be effected won't be that much. So I decided there was little point in waiting around. Some of the brokers tell you to wait about since you will get better deals, yeah, well that was before Brexit and that may apply to UK manufactured ones not imported ones.

Experience on discounts is that the Broadspeed ones were fantasy. They couldn't get them at that price although what they were putting up last week matched what I got from a local dealer less a couple of hundred. Autoebyte have always been much lower but then they have the £750 fee they charge to the dealer, you can add that into your discount to derive the discount that you could expect all things being equal if you were dealing with the dealer direct, take off a couple of hundred and that might be the figure.

Now main Seat dealers not independents don't seem to be giving discounts, Broadspeed give you the patter about pricing is not agreed on the price to the dealer, got this patter from another franchise dealer. In short I got what I got when I bought my Altea in the first month of launch which was 2.9 percent rounding to one decimal place. Now I know loads of people may pile in saying they got more. Profit margins aren't that great for dealers so it was probably realistic given that Seat are holding the price. At the end of the day if you have your money invested, markets are going up driven as well by that currency movement, so missing out on the odd £3,000 I'm not bothered. Us people with money invested abroad who didn't support Brexit have done very well about it, those that did support Brexit also got those currency dividends - a weird old world. Enough to pay for the car with the 40 percent tax I'll be paying to keep within the life time limit, so I stopped messing about in counting the pennies on this one. I am a modeller by trade so that's my analysis. Obviously if Seat don't try to absorb their cost pressures in the short term and drop the price they sell them to dealers and give large bonuses etc then I might have made the wrong decision. I really don't think that the price drop will be coming through on a large scale solely due to Brexit currency shift. They may have sweeteners from September but I'm hoping they are no sweeter than what I got, hopefully I'm a couple of months ahead in the build date queue. As said I'm not really bothered to be out of pocket by £3,000 but the chances of that are pretty low I reckon.
 
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