Our Fleet Test Drive: Seat Leon X-perience: 6th report

I’ve adopted our long-term Leon, primarily to use it as a load-lugger for a two-week family holiday in France.

Although the Leon ST’s huge boot would just about have swallowed everything we may or may not have needed for a fortnight away with a pair of small children, we went conservative and added the Thule roofbox to play safe – and it was handy in terms of keeping sandy beach toys, wet swimming costumes and towels and the pushchair out of the car.

It also meant we could pull the luggage cover across the boot to keep prying eyes away from our bootful of appealing tourist-related luggage at the overnight hotel stops in either direction.

We covered 1300 miles in the two weeks, and the Leon X-perience was comfortable and flawless, although the economy did drop off noticeably when taking advantage of the higher French speed limits and empty roads after we rolled off the pleasing, efficient and comfortable P&O boat that sailed into Calais late on a Friday night.

The boot doubled up nicely a a post-beach changing area for the kids, which explains how we ended up bringing back half of a French beach with us, while the X-perience averaged 38.8mpg in our time away