Left-hand drive vehicles are a rare sight on our roads and a Seat Arona SUV with the same configuration, even more so! For those of you who don’t know about it, Seat is a Spanish carmaker which enjoys the parenthood of Volkswagen and the Arona SUV which has made an appearance time and again, is built on Volkswagen’s MQB A0 platform. It is the same platform which is going to underpin the likes of the upcoming Volkswagen Taigun and the Skoda Vision-IN SUV.
The question is?
So the question is, what is a Seat Arona SUV with a left-hand drive configuration doing on our streets? The Spanish SUV was spotted by our reader Mihir Kulkarni.
It is highly unlikely that Volkswagen is planning to introduce Seat in the Indian market, however, it does make sense for the company to use the Arona SUV as a test mule to test the platform feasibility for future models from the brand in the country. It isn’t the first time that the Seat Arona SUV has showed its smart face in our country. It has been spied on multiple occasions, testing in different driving conditions. A few months back, it was snapped doing test runs in the Himalayas and even before that, reports stated that the Arona SUV was caught testing on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway.
Specifications
Talking about the car now, the SUV is offered with a 1.0-litre TSI three-cylinder turbo-petrol engine that produces 114bhp and 200Nm of torque. The engine comes mated to either a six-speed manual or a seven-speed DSG. The Volkswagen Group is currently in the process of developing a heavily localised cost-effective version of the MQB A0 platform, known as the MQB A0 IN. And as we mentioned earlier, the Seat Arona SUV is built on the MQB A0 platform so this test mule might just be a lab rat for Volkswagen.
Volkswagen India is planning to dominate the SUV market in India. To appeal to the masses, Volkswagen has another arrow in its quiver, named the Taigun. Volkswagen recently revealed that they will launch the production-spec Taigun around mid-2021. What is worth noting here is that it will be joined by the Skoda Vision IN and the latter will be reaching the showrooms first, with Volkswagen following up with the Taigun pretty soon. With the Vision IN and Taigun, Skoda Auto Volkswagen India can finally begin to set their pieces in motion for their India 2.0 strategy.