Third Report

Two months in with our long-term Leon and I’m really starting to get to grips with it. It still seems a bit weird having such a low-specification car on the press fleet; we’re so used to having something packed with all of the bells and whistles that our optionless SE Dynamic edition is generally a welcome breath of fresh air. After all, as mentioned in my first report, it’s hardly what you’d call spartan.

No sooner had I filed my last report on the Leon’s safety kit than SEAT sent out a press release to say that its family car was one of the first models to score five stars in the tougher new Euro NCAP tests. This is thanks to the fitment of a raft of driver assistance systems as standard, along with a central front airbag, to stop the driver and passenger from bashing into each other in the event of a side impact. One piece of safety kit that’s been mandatory on all new cars sold in the EU since November 2014, is tyre pressure monitoring (TPMS). As someone who avoids driving in the gutter, I’ve suffered very few punctures over the years and I check my tyre pressures regularly too, which is why I’ve generally found TPMS to be more trouble than it’s worth. Whenever the dashboard starts getting excited, flashing up that I’m down on air pressure on one corner, it’s invariably been a false alarm.

However, just after I filed my last report that’s exactly what happened when my colleague Vicky was driving the Leon, and sure enough the nearside rear tyre was down to just 15psi instead of the 37psi that it should have been. The tyre had picked up a nail, thankfully in the treaded area so it could be repaired.

Vicky took the Leon to a local fast-fit tyre repair outlet, which unfortunately wasn’t so fast; they wanted the car to be left with them for the day, as being over the Christmas/New Year period, they were inundated with work. With Vicky’s purse £15 lighter as a result, the car was driven away and all seemed to be well. When the dashboard started to flash up TPMS warnings in the ensuing days, the assumption was made on our part, that the repair centre had bungled things.

We’d reset the TPMS when we collected the car, and my tyre pressure gauge told me that all was well on the pressure-holding front, so each time we got a warning we didn’t know whether to believe it or not. Fearing that a sensor had been damaged when the tyre was repaired, we checked all of the pressures once more, reset the system again, and hoped for the best – and so far, it’s all behaving itself, so with a bit of luck it has sorted itself out. Fingers crossed!

Date arrived 17th November 2020
Mileage 1,991
Economy (WLTP combined) 60.1-64.2mpg
Economy (On test) 55.7mpg