Spanish Crusade

Once a subbrand of Seat, upstart Cupra plans to bring a bit of Catalonian flair to the U.S. by the end of the decade.

- Greg Fink

OF THE EIGHT AUTOMOTIVE brands under the Volkswagen Group umbrella, only Cupra has managed continuous global sales growth over the past six years. Once a performance subbrand of Spanish automaker Seat (pronounced SAY-aht), Cupra became its own marque for 2018 with the arrival of the Ateca, a performance-oriented sibling of the Seat Ateca compact SUV. Cupra sales in 2018 totaled a rather unremarkable 14,400 units, or roughly one-fifth the number of Seat Atecas sold.

As Cupra’s lineup grew, so did its sales. Though the Cupra Leon followed the blueprint of its Ateca stablemate in being a more dynamically Capable variant of a Seat model bearing an identical nameplate, Cupra—a name derived from “Cup racing”—soon differentiated itself from Seat with the addition of the Formentor, a small SUV with no Seat counterpart. The battery-electric Born and Tavascan, as well as the Terramar compact SUV, soon followed, netting the nascent brand a total of four distinct models in what is now a seven-car lineup and helping it move a record 248,100 units in 2024—more than 17 times what it sold just six years earlier.