•    Car company on board in design of urban mobility in the city as well as taking the Barcelona brand global.
•    Barcelona Mayor Jordi Hereu, and SEAT Chairman James Muir converge on strategy to make the city an international benchmark for creativity.

Barcelona Mayor Jordi Hereu and SEAT Chairman James Muir met today at Barcelona City Hall to discuss the car manufacturer’s new phase, which includes a determination to strengthen ties with the city of Barcelona and raise its profile as a centre of innovation and creativity.

One of the main areas of collaboration is the promotion of on-the-ground innovation for eco-friendly vehicles. Here, James Muir reaffirmed his commitment to making Barcelona a testing ground for SEAT’s new green technologies, including a future research and development (R&D) centre in environmental and energy efficiency for the entire Volkswagen Group, as well as the creation of a dedicated working group with a view to collaboration on mobility design within the city.

Mayor Jordi Hereu underscored the fact that SEAT’s plans “make a perfect match for Barcelona’s commitment to transforming itself into a global benchmark city in matters of innovation and creativity. And the automotive industry can provide a great deal of input when designing the urban mobility of the future in collaboration with the city itself”.

Within this field, Barcelona’s LIVE office brings together the major stakeholders –SEAT being one of the more noteworthy - involved in the introduction of electrically-powered vehicles in the city. Barcelona also heads the MOVELE project - under the aegis of the Spanish Ministry for Industry, and which also has SEAT on board– so as to transform itself into one of Europe’s most outstanding exponents of urban mobility by creating a minimum number of 191 recharging points for electrical vehicles.

For its part, SEAT leads its own project entitled VERDE (‘Green’ in Spanish) – again under the tutelage of the Spanish Ministry for Industry - which aims to do research into and generate know-how for the future manufacture and marketing of eco-friendly vehicles in Spain.

SEAT Chairman James Muir stated that “Barcelona is a very powerful global brand that can help SEAT relaunch its own brand on the basis of values such as design, sportiness and young spirit”.

Contact persons for further information:

Serafí del Arco Manjón              Anna Franco
SEAT, S.A.                                 Ajuntament de Barcelona
Tel.:+34 93 708 5869                 Tel: +34 93 402 78 67
serafi.delarco@seat.es              afrancoma@bcn.cat