Cupra Won’t Offer A Sports Car In The Near Future, Says Company Boss

Seat and Cupra CEO Luca de Meo was pretty negative about the prospect of Cupra building a bespoke sports car, at least for the near future.

Talking to Autocar, de Meo said: “You want roadsters, two-seaters, cabrios? This is a typical perspective from your [British] market. We don’t get that question from other markets… sometimes from Germans.”

Since its launch as a standalone performance brand, Cupra was justifiably expected to tackle the sports car segment, but the SUV-loving market is the one who eventually dictates the company’s next moves.

“SUVs are called sports utility vehicles because they represent a new concept of sportiness,” De Meo explained. “These kinds of things, SUVs with a coupé look, this is what for us was the two-door – an impractical coupé you could barely fit in, but it was fast, the handling was amazing because of a low centre of gravity etc. These things are gone.”

The head of Cupra said that building a sports car in today’s market is an emotional move, not a rational one, at least for the time being.

“I cannot afford to drop a few hundred million on something where I sell 15,000 cars at a loss just for the sake of doing a sports car,” he said. “When I have some resources, I can tell you we have a lot of creativity, but right now this is not a priority. Seat sells 500,000 cars [annually]. I do not have the luxury to do that sort of thing, although I do like it.”

Cupra has so far showcased three new models, all of them SUVs: the Cupra Ateca, which is currently in production, and the Formentor and Tavascan concepts, both of them expected to reach the market in the next two years as sporty hybrid SUV Coupes.

This, however, wasn’t the original idea for the Cupra brand, as De Meo admits: “I wanted to create a business around the motorsport division to protect it from my successor coming in and saying ‘Racing? We don’t need that’ and closing [it]. I wanted to create a business around motorsport that can finance its operations. That was the initial idea. Then it became much bigger.”