The Toledo was the first five-door Seat whose styling was not based on a Fiat’s, the Spanish company starting life as a state-owned licenced builder of Fiats back in 1950.
That made the Toledo only the third Seat of entirely unique design, after the pretty Seat 1200 Sport coupe of 1975 and Giorgetto Giugiaro’s crisp first series Ibiza of 1984. Giugiaro designed the first Toledo, too.
This third own-brand Seat was not as delicately stylish as the first two, but what it did have in its favour was hardware – lots of it – from the second generation VW Golf.
Floor, suspension, engine bay and almost the entire suite of powertrains eventually offered in the Golf II were provided for the Toledo, including a 115bhp version of the GTi’s 1.8 engine and later, the highly-coveted 126bhp 16-valve version.
Those outputs don’t sound much now, and the Toledo GT and GTi carried a little more weight than the Golf, but the chassis of these sportier five-doors had been engineered with as much enthusiasm as that of its Wolfsburg cousin.
The result was almost certainly the most entertaining hatchback you could buy with a boot big enough to swallow a student’s bedsit possessions whole, and it was cheaper than the Golf too.
That enormous boot, and the extra heft of the metalwork overhanging its twist-beam back axle meant that unexpectedly, the Toledo was a friskier bend-basher than the VW.
Curiously, these cars were not as robustly built as your Mk2 Golf. Most of the pure VW bits were ok, but interior trim used to untether itself and go a-roving, loose pieces that had yet to taste freedom squeaking their excitement at the prospect of a trip to the Seat’s beckoning footwells.
The doorbins of a fondly remembered long-term test 16-valve Toledo contained several stray parts, although it never broke down.
If you can remember this Seat at all it’s as likely to be because you once rode aboard a Toledo taxi in Spain as it is because you knew of one in the UK. But in this otherwise unremarkable car there was a gem. If you ever get the chance to try a Toledo 16-valve you should take it – you might be surprised.
