Seat Tarraco review

Think of the Seat Tarraco as the Boaty McBoatface of the car world. Nope, not because it’s a 15,000-tonne, 130-metre-long behemoth designed to explore the Antarctic, but rather because you, the general public, voted on its name.

The difference is that Seat actually went with the moniker that nearly 150,000 people from around the world voted for, instead of throwing it out and naming it after some famous naturalist. If you’re wondering, Tarraco isn’t a made-up word; it’s the ancient name for the modern Spanish city of Tarragona, just down the coast from Barcelona.

But enough about the name and how it came to be; what is the new Tarraco? Fairly obviously, even in heavily camouflaged guise as pictured, it’s an SUV – and it’s a pretty sizeable one, too, sitting above the Ateca as the Spanish brand’s new flagship model.

If you were to rip away all that heavily disguised bodywork, you’d actually find roughly the same underpinnings as you would in a Skoda Kodiaq and, as with that car, you can choose to have either five or seven seats, depending on whether you need to carry lots of people or lots of paraphernalia.

Seat is still putting the finishing touches to the Tarraco ahead of first customer deliveries in early 2019. However, insiders have told us that it’s already very nearly the finished article.

So, why might you choose to wait for the Tarraco instead of just buying a Kodiaq – a car you can already get a big discount on by using our New Car Buying service? Well, despite all that clever camouflage designed to trick the eye, there’s little doubt that Seat has taken a more extrovert approach to the styling. In this respect, it’s perhaps more likely to appeal to buyers interested in the futuristic-looking Peugeot 5008.

Read on to find out everything we know about the Tarraco, including what it’s like to drive and how practical it is.