Cupra boss “would love to make the Dark Rebel come true”

Remember in 2018 when Cupra – then Seat's performance badge - was hived off into a separate company? At the time we couldn’t really see the point, and joked the logo looked like a regrettable tattoo you got on a holiday in Tenerife.

Well, look who’s laughing now, because the rise of the Cupra brand has been meteoric in the last six years – from 14,000 in 2018 to 230,000 cars sold last year, that’s 650,000 shifted in total since Cupra’s incorporation. Impressive stuff.

The problem with success though, is you need to back it up with more success. Key to that is a massively expanded range that by next year will consist of Leon, Formentor, Born, Tavascan, Terramar and Raval – but also a new halo car or “brand icon” in the ridiculously good-looking shooting-brake shape of the Dark Rebel. Revealed as a 450bhp concept car last year, plans are already afoot to turn it into a production reality as soon as the bean-counters give the nod.

“There are two important levers to boost Cupra’s brand value from $1.7bn today to $4bn by 2030: you need a brand icon and I would love to try and make the Dark Rebel come true,” Wayne Griffiths, Cupra’s president and CEO, told us. “The other one is going global because to create that level of brand value, you have to be a global brand. For us that means going to the United States by the end of this decade.”

Rather than being a low-volume, 100-car special, the pure-electric Dark Rebel would need to sell between 10,000 and 20,000 units a year to make it profitable, and therefore leverage platform and component sharing within the VW Group. A new electric architecture, called SSP Sport, being developed for the new Porsche Boxster and Cayman EVs could be the perfect candidate with the batteries located behind driver and passenger for mid-engined handling balance and a low-slung seating position.

What needs to happen before Griffiths can give the Dark Rebel the green light? “We need to make a lot of money. We need to continue to grow profitably and sustainably and then it can become one of our priorities. At the moment we have a lot of other priorities, like making the Tavascan and Terramar fly, but a car like this would have a huge impact on the Cupra brand.

"Can it be the number one priority of the company? It would be very foolish, even egoistic. I'd love to do the car, it would be my car and when they retire me they can send me home in it… if I can get in and out of it by then.”