Altea Motive
by Tom Stewart (25 Jul 08)

Seven hundred and fifty miles in a day is rarely a doddle, especially when you've a wife and three kids aboard, but the drive down to our now-annual holiday destination on the Côte d'Azure proved to be a real feat of endurance this year.

The car chosen to suffer with us was a SEAT Altea XL 2.0TDI Stylance (that's the 2.0TDI with 138bhp, not the 168bhp version). This being the year of the "crunch" and even more exorbitant fuel prices, we needed a car just big enough for the five of us plus luggage, and one with ample, rather than surplus power.

The day chosen for the trip turned out to be the Friday before Bastille Day, seemingly the day when every French person with a car also chose to drive south on the same autoroute as us. It was a day of successive traffic jams, hot sun, thunder, lightening, torrential rain, hail, high winds, and then, an hour's drive from our destination on any ordinary day, the jam to end all jams - caused, apparently, by an overturned lorry and subsequent closure of the autoroute. Aarrgghh.

Last year's drive wasn't without its hold-ups, but we completed the same Calais to Ste Maxime journey in 10.5 hours. This year, again stopping twice for fuel, it took 17 hours 10 minutes, or over 20 hours including the drive to Dover and the P&O crossing to Calais. If we'd known what was in store we'd have picked another day, but c'est la vie . . .

Now in case you're slightly confused by SEAT's current range (and I wouldn't blame you) the León is the mid-sized, C-sector hatchback, the Altea is essentially a taller, roomier, "monospace" version of same, while the Altea XL is an 18.7cm longer estate. (There's also the similarly-sized and priced Toledo notchback, but this has slight executive, or D-sector, aspirations and is something of a niche model in the UK.)

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