Long Term Report: Saying a fond farewell to the Seat Arona

It was a typical weekday evening in the Brown household. Strictly – It Takes Two had finished and my wife and I were idly looking at our mobile phones. Good times.

After a minute or two of silence, though, she said: “You’ve made a mistake here.”

As you can imagine, that’s a sentence I’ve heard quite a bit in nearly 30 years of married life but this time I was a bit worried – it was work-related.

Surprisingly, she had chanced upon the last report I wrote about the long-term Seat Arona we’ve been running this year.

“You say there’s no handy tyre pressure sticker on the inside of the petrol cap – which is true,’ she continued, rather too gleefully for my liking.

“But it’s on the inside of the passenger door now. Seat have moved it, that’s all.”

I didn’t need to go outside and check – I knew she’d be right. She had been getting in and out of the passenger side of the car for six or seven months, after all, so had clearly noticed.

Anyway, armed with that information, I was able to check that the tyres were at the correct pressures before the car left us for the last time recently.

But before we said goodbye to KM67 XUU, it was put through its paces pretty thoroughly once again – and didn’t disappoint.

The reason? I’d suggested a trip to see the stage version of the BBC TV sitcom Early Doors, which was a fantastically funny show (in my opinion) from about 15 years ago, starring Craig Cash and Phil Mealey. The only performance we could make, though, was in Hull – quite a long way from our home on the south coast.

So it was that we jumped into the Arona on a very rainy Saturday morning and headed up the A34 before continuing to East Yorkshire. It was a trip that lasted four or five hours and involved us making good use of quite a large percentage of the UK’s motorway network and several of its service stations.

It all meant a proper workout for the compact Spanish SUV, which performed admirably. It was completely unfazed by the dreadful driving conditions and got us to Hull’s Bonus Arena in comfort and safety. It really is a cracking little model and probably explains why, in a tough market, Seat is performing strongly, with new car registrations up 13 per cent year-on-year.

Hull wasn’t the only place we visited that weekend, by the way. From there we travelled to Gloucestershire so that my wife could attend a talk by Gary Barlow at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. (At least when we got home after that, we were back for good.)
All in all, our Arona travelled more than 550 miles over the two days and didn’t put a foot wrong.

Actually, that’s not quite true. Our journey was punctuated by a sat-nav quirk I’ve mentioned before, which involves the driver being instructed to leave a particular main road, go over a roundabout and rejoin the same carriageway!

But now, as I have mentioned, the car has been returned to the good people at Seat – and the weather was a bit iffy on the morning it was due to be collected. A sudden downpour meant we didn’t reattach the Seat-supplied roof box, which in all honesty we hadn’t used during the car’s time with us. (The press office people kindly agreed we could return that later.)

So, seven months of The Knack-based jokes about ‘m-m-my Arona’ turned into gags along the lines of ‘bye Arona’ and the car disappeared over the horizon (well, out of the gate near our office building…). It will be greatly missed.