It’s 50 years since the first SEAT car rolled off the production line in Spain. The first car, a SEAT 1400, was produced on 13 November 1953 at the Zona Franca Plant in Barcelona, three years after the company was set up on 9 May 1950. The first SEAT 1400, a four-door saloon with a 44 bhp engine delivering a top speed 75 mph (120 km/h).
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When production of the SEAT 1400 stopped in 1964, over 98,000 units had been produced.
Back in 1953, SEAT employed 900 workers who produced five cars a day. Today SEAT cars are designed, researched and produced in a modern plant at Martorell, just outside Barcelona, which was opened 40 years later in 1993. The workforce now totals 14,300 and the plant produces more than 2000 cars a day.
Since 1953 SEAT has produced more than 14 million cars.
Fifty years on, SEAT says its brand continues to evolve as part of the Audi Brand Group of companies (along with Audi and Lamborghini). SEAT also says that a new phase in the brand’s evolution begins next year when the Altea MSV, the first of a whole new generation of SEAT products, is launched in the spring.
