Electric SEAT Altea & plug-in SEAT Leon hybrid revealed

SEAT has revealed a plug-in hybrid – the SEAT Leon TwinDrive Ecomotive – and an EV – the SEAT Altea XL Electric Ecomotive.

Seat may have revealed a pair of cars with ‘eco’ powerplants –  the Leon TwinDrive Ecomotive and the Altea XL Electric Ecomotive – but they’re not coming to a showroom near you. Well, not before 2015, anyway.

The plan is to build a small prototype fleet of the Leon Hybrid and Altea EV and make them available to local government in Catalonia and Madrid, to get evaluation and real-world feedback before the cars go in to production, which won’t be for at least four years.

The Altea XL Electric Ecomotive gets a 115bhp electric motor with just shy of 200lb/ft of torque. The battery pack is hidden under the back seats and gets a bit of help from a kinetic energy recovery system and photovoltaic  cells on the roof to help the AirCon. Top speed is limited to just 84mph.

The Leon plug-in manages to pretend to be an EV for up to 34 miles (we’re back to the EVs only in a city type of range car makers are scared legislators will introduce) and gets the usual daft hybrid computation of economy with a quoted 166mpg. It can struggle to 75mph and has CO2 emissions of 39g/km.

All of which is academic as the Altea EV and Leon plug-in will doubtless change significantly over the time it takes to evaluate them in local government use.

Still, good to SEAT keeping up and looking forward.