America Is About To Get Europe's Coolest Car Brand And I'm Pumped - The Autopian (2024)

I think we all know that Škoda is Europe’sbest brand (no I will not explain), but Cupra is probably Europe’s hottest brand right now. The cars look great, they’re fun, and people seem to love them. Now we’re finding out that Cupra is coming to the United States. W00t!

Cupra might be Europe’s coolest car brand, but Europe’s favorite pastime is watching what kind of BS Formula 1 is going to get itself involved in next. This time they’ve crossedSusie Wolff; well, I wouldn’t do that.

Speaking of F1, Aston Martin (the automaker) has a new boss. What’s the opposite of a brand that’s been in F1? Lincoln. Ford’s luxury brand has rarely been sporty, and that laid-back attitude has extended to inventory as the Lincoln brand has dumped a ton of cars on dealers it meant to deliver last year. That’s not great, but it may not be Nissan Rogue bad.

Happy Friday Morning Dumpers, let’s squeeze out a good one!

Volkswagen’s Cupra Is Coming

Cupra is a weird brand. Initially, Cupra started as a trim level offered by Seat, a once Fiat-associated Spanish automaker. Then, in the 1980s, Seat was purchased by Volkswagen to add to its giant list of subbrands.

Cupra was sort of like Seat’s AMG, meaning you used to be able to get, like, a Seat Leon Cupra (a portmanteau of Cup Racing). There are many famous Cupra cars, but the one you might know best is the mid-2000s León Cupra R, based on the same platform as the Mk4 Golf:

Eventually, more cars got the Cupra treatment and, in 2018, Seat decided to create a new sub-brand called Cupra that would focus on making a sportier range of vehicles the company could then export elsewhere. The brand, while making gas-powered cars, was also designed to eventually focus on hybrids and EVs.

The cars look great. Walking around England I kept seeking out Cupras and saw a couple of Formentors and, I think, a León driving the opposite direction. As with Škoda, Porsche, Audi and other VW brands, these are all just different flavors of modular VW platforms, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t all great. A spicy crawfish etouffee and a simple bechamel both start out as a roux, if you catch my drift.

I was sort of wondering if VW might try to introduce another brand to the United States to counter Polestar but, given how Polestar’s been doing lately, that didn’t seem like an obvious move. Thus my surprise when Cupra/Seat CEO Wayne Griffiths said the following yesterday:

“By the end of the decade CUPRA will be entering the U.S. market. We plan to launch with the battery electric version of the Formentor and a bigger electric crossover SUV. That crossover SUV will be produced at Volkswagen Group factories in the North America region, including Mexico. Initially, CUPRA will launch in selected states in the East and West coasts and the Sun Belt states. This will be done through a new distribution model,” announced Wayne Griffiths.

There is a lot to unpack there. Let’s start with the obvious; here’s what the current Fomentor looks like:

This is a C-Segment crossover based on the same MQB Evo as the Golf, Audi A3, Tiguan, Ford Tourneo Connect…

A new one is going to come out in the next couple of years, and the United States will seemingly only get the EV version. The larger EV? Unclear what that’ll be, but it’s likely a Kia EV9-style thing maybe? Maybe a version of the ID.Buzz?

Also, what the hell does this mean:

“This will be done through a new distribution model.”

I’ve checked the wires and no one else seems to know either, so I’m excited to hear about that. Either way, more new weird car brands is good and, hopefully, the first round of BEV crossovers will be followed up by something small and sporty like the ID.3-based Cupra Born, which I like very much:

More weird car brands, just don’t make the Alpine mistake and bring us some cars, too!

FIA Leadership Loves Shooting Their Own Dicks Off

I chose the phallic reference above for a good reason as the FIA and F1 seem to have swapped the sort of chummy ’70s misogyny of Bernie Ecclestone-era F1 for something far more insidious and also somehow more hamfisted. Sure, the whole Ecclestone-era schtick of only allowing women near the cars if they were holding an umbrella was pretty awful in retrospect, but it was comically obvious what they were doing and they made no real secret of their feelings.

Now there’s a new F1 and FIA with a super obvious double standard when it comes to how it treats women, though this is going to get into the complex relationship between the owners of F1 the brand (Liberty Media), the FIA (the governing body), and F1 as a collection of teams.

Oh boy, where to start?

Susie Wolff is a Scottish race car driver and former Formula E team principal who is now in charge of the F1 Academy, which is Formula 1’s attempt at making a racing series to encourage participation by female drivers in the highest level of motorsports. Is this the best way to do this? I don’t know, but it seems like a genuine effort and I’m not going to letgreat be the enemy of something.

By virtue of F1 being a small world and everyone in F1 being a little extra, as demonstrated byDrive To Survive, Teutonic superman Toto Wolff of Mercedes-AMG F1 fame and Susie Wolff (then Susie Stoddart) fell in love and got married and had kids. I’ve met both of them and they seem like accomplished and successful professionals. Racing is a tough job with a ton of travel and, you know, hats off to them for making it work. Also, my favorite impression is my Toto Wolff impression “Michael, zis is so unfair, Michael!”

For, like, one weird week in December, the FIA said it was going to do an investigation of Susie Wolff because other F1 teams complained that the involvement of Wolff in the F1 Academy was a conflict of interest. Almost immediately after the FIA announcement, every team came out and said “We don’t know what you’re talking about FIA” and the thing was dropped. It was pretty insulting and was just one of many things that FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem did that pissed everyone off.

Fast forward to earlier this year and it is alleged that Red Bull’s Christian Horner made a lot of advances to a Red Bull Racing employee and was otherwise a weird boss. There are supposed leaked but unconfirmed texts. It’s a messy saga, but Red Bull did a quick investigation and cleared Horner. Red Bull then quickly suspended the woman who made the claims. It is difficult to ascertain if this employee’s claims are legitimate, but the vibe around F1 and F1 reporters is that they seem plausible and the employee, for her part, isn’t backing down. Additionally, Horner and Red Bull seem to have gone out of their way to not confirm if the texts are real or not and will not name the lawyer who supposedly conducted the internal investigation. Is it shady? It feels shady.

All of this is important because the FIA has also not said if it’s actually investigating Horner or not. This seems like a huge double standard given that it immediately announced it was investigating Susie Wolff for committing the terrible sin of being, uh, married, but hasn’t said much about Horner.

Anyway, here’s Susie Wolff on X/Twitter:

pic.twitter.com/TstQDODhQc

— Susie Wolff (@Susie_Wolff) March 20, 2024

The FIA, so far as I’ve seen, hasn’t provided much detail to any reporter asking about the complaint. At the same time, Red Bull is dealing with a world of drama as champion driver Max Verstappen’s dad Jos Verstappen is going around telling everyone that Horner needs to go away and people keep wondering if the FIA will actually investigate the issue.

Here’s the great kicker to this story, courtesy ofBBC Sport:

Meanwhile, over the course of the Bahrain Grand Prix weekend, Ben Sulayem approached Red Bull driver Max Verstappen and said he should make a public statement supporting Horner.

Verstappen responded, sources close to the world champion have told BBC Sport, by telling Ben Sulayem he should launch his own investigation into the matter.

I’m not a huge Max Verstappen fan, personally, but I do feel a little bad for the kid because it seems like his whole life is just him being pressured by weird dads.

Aston Martin Appoints Adrian Hallmark As CEO

Speaking of F1 dads, props to Aston Martin Chairman Lawrence Stroll for snagging ex-Bentley Motors CEO Adrian Hallmark as the new CEO of the company, replacing Amedeo Felisa.

As CEO of Bentley, Hallmark did an undeniably great job of making the company über profitable while also getting the brand through the pandemic.

Here’s what Stroll had to say about it:

“In Adrian Hallmark, we are attracting one of the highest calibre leaders not just in our segment, but in the entire global automotive industry. Complementing our world-class leadership, Adrian will bring to Aston Martin unrivalled experience in both the ultra-luxury and British manufacturing sectors to progress our strategy and continue recent momentum.”

Aston Martin seems like a tough gig at the moment given the company’s ongoing financial losses, so I think Hallmark has the potential to be a great pick.

It Might Be A Good Time To Buy A Lincoln

While far from its heyday, Lincoln has managed to continue to plug along selling cars every year. It’s also starting to get a little more product support from Ford as the brand shifts towards more lux + tech.

One of the biggest challenges for Lincoln last year was inventory as UAW strikes and quality issues (including a stop-sale for the popular Aviator) hampered sales. Now, it seems, the opposite is happening. Lincoln has fixed its production woes and has now delivered a ton of cars, including 2023 MY crossovers to dealers. According toAutomotive News, the February stock of Lincolns is three times what it was a year ago.

From that report:

“It was kind of a perfect storm for the factory to have to get through,” Chris Poulos, chairman of the Lincoln National Dealer Council, told Automotive News. “We’re dealing with it on a day-to-day basis. All in all, yes, inventories are up, but I look at it as an opportunity to get some volume.”

Still, some dealers have voiced concerns over the need to more quickly reduce supply, citing concerns over how lingering 2023 models could affect floorplan costs or hurt their ability to market the newest vehicles.

“We’re going to do what we need to do to clear out the old models as we need to, and so far it’s going well,” Lincoln President Dianne Craig said in an interview this month, adding that the focus was on incentives. “The last couple months we’ve made some really good progress.”

Lincoln sales are already trending upward this year, so if you’re in the market for a luxury car and don’t mind a 2023 model you might be able to get a good deal.

What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD

This was playing in a Honda Civic roughly three blocks away, but it was playing so loudly I heard it quite clearly. Let’s start Friday with a little Shaggy. Where does his unique voice come from? He was in the Marines and the voice was originally created to mock drill instructors. I love that.

The Big Question

Which brand not in the United States would you bring here? Obviously, I’d bring Škoda.