The car Cupra Leon Estate 2.0TSI 4Drive 310 DSG Run by John Bradshaw, chief photographer
Why it’s here To see if this sporty family estate can cut it as a workhorse from Monday to Friday and an entertainer at the weekend.
Needs to Be fun on the right road, while carrying heavy, bulky camera equipment all over the country in comfort and safety.
Photography, my day job, is an art. And yet, within all the creativity and technique that my art involves, there has to be an objective purpose for it – otherwise What Car? wouldn’t pay me. It strikes me that my Cupra Leon Estate gets things the other way round; to look at, or to describe, it’s an estate car like any other. But the way it goes about being an estate car is, well… it’s art.
Still with me? No? Okay, let’s talk about the worthy stuff first, before we get abstract. Early on in my time with the Cupra Leon, my main concern was whether it could possibly be as practical as the BMW X1 and Nissan Qashqai SUVs I’d previously run. And despite initial misgivings when the Leon struggled to wolf down massive garden waste bags (yes, even artists have to weed their gardens every now and again) with quite the appetite those family SUVs had shown, it actually proved a better photographer’s steed. It was simply easier to load all my bulky photography gear into the Leon’s wide and relatively shallow boot floor than it was in the SUVs.
So, as an estate car, the Leon nails the practicality brief. But then again, the Skoda Octavia Estate, Toyota Corolla Touring Sports and a multitude of other family estate cars do pretty much the same thing. Unlike those cars, though, practicality is only a tiny facet of the Cupra Leon’s personality. The Corolla and Octavia may score highly in the “a pleasure to live with day-to-day” stakes, but the Leon is frankly on another planet when it comes to driver appeal.
Since June, the Leon has accompanied me to shoots all over the country, getting properly stuck in when it gets there. And even when it was in the company of such fun machines as the Honda Civic Type-R hot hatch and Mazda MX-5 sports car, it never seemed overshadowed as a driver’s car. In fact, when in convoy with those very cars on a winding road, not once did I fear that I might fall behind them (cheers to the Cupra’s 304bhp and massive cornering grip for that). And while the road testers were probably having a lot of fun behind the wheels of both cars, I doubt they were enjoying themselves a lot more than I was.
That, there, is the Cupra Leon’s art. It looks like an estate, but it identifies as a sports car. It’ll shrug off any workaday job you throw at it – trips to the tip, Ikea runs, long, motorway slogs – with grace and efficiency, but it eagerly rises to the occasion when there’s fun to be had. Whenever you want, it’ll sprint from 0-62mph in just 4.9sec, yet the fuel consumption of 34.5mpg that it’s averaged over my time with it is anything but the stuff of sports cars.
Of course, not everybody sees value in a work of art, and the Cupra Leon Estate doesn’t seem to attract enthralled crowds when exhibited on a used car forecourt. The What Car? magazine data section suggests that it’ll hold onto 50% of its value when three years old, and having covered almost 11,200 miles, my car has lost more than £10,000 of its purchase price. After that painful initial plunge, its value should now level out somewhat, but that does make the Leon Estate quite a tasty used buy at a year old.
Is it the car for me? Well, it’s pretty darn close. Back in June, I began my Cupra Leon ownership adventure with a question; are estate cars unfairly overlooked in favour of SUVs. Pretty soon, I found the answer to be yes. In practical terms, the Leon does everything that a family SUV can, and anybody who’s keen on driving will find it even more rewarding. One thing it can’t offer – and which I miss – is a lofty driving position; the mechanically similar Cupra Ateca can, but that SUV would be left in the dust by the Leon on a twisty road.
The real art of the Cupra, though, is how it left me thinking about it every time I walked away.
