Why the Seat 600 was more important to Spaniards than the VW Beetle

When you talk about the Seat 600, most old-timer enthusiasts will soon drop out uninterested. After all, it is only a licensed product (Fiat 600) and the Fiat 500 looks a lot cuter than the 600. Spaniards, however, do not understand why people ignore this car. In Spain, the Seat 600 did not play as important a role as the Beetle did in our country at the time, no, this car was even more important. “The Spaniards switched from donkey carts to the 600,” said Seat engineer Silvio del Arco. That may be an exaggeration, but it’s not far off.

All items that did not fit under the front cover were transported on the roof. The 600 was both a pack mule and a member of the family, a status symbol and a slice of freedom on wheels.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the name Seat in Spain was almost synonymous with car, a motorist was also called a seaton named. How much the seisceintos (600) has changed Spanish society, outlines Isabel Martín Sánchez of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. “The availability of a car made it possible to travel to unknown places and made many Spaniards want to broaden their horizons,” the information science professor writes in a new essay (doi.org/10.1387/hc. 19535) .

In 1969 Seat’s fashion model wore a mini dress. Other advertising photos show women behind the wheel of the 600.

At first, the car seemed to fit in perfectly with the values ​​and virtues of Spanish society. He contributed to the country’s development, progress and national pride, without undermining the Catholic Church. After all, it was also a family car. But it soon became a popular sport to go out with the Seat on Sunday. Since then, the term Sunday rider also exists in Spanish, dominguero. Many people skipped church attendance. Isabel Martín Sánchez calls it ‘social secularization: Sunday outings replaced religious obligations’. Many of those rides ended on the beach, where foreign visitors found more impertinent attachments than the Catholic Church wanted.

Beautifully dressed lady with a Seat 600. According to the advertising people behind this advertisement, her place was still the co-driver’s seat.

Achilles heel Seat 600 was boiling radiator

The 600 does have an Achilles heel in the form of a boiling radiator. Smart 600 owners therefore always carried a bottle of water and a band for the fan. However, it did not detract from his reputation as a reliable all-rounder. The model had numerous pet names. The 600 became platoon (ball), obligatory (belly button, because everyone had one) or garbancito (small chickpea). He was soon so popular and so widespread that he also took the pop scene by storm. He played major roles in numerous films. People told jokes about the 600, there were 600 cartoons. Little Seatje even played a role in poems and later in Graham Greene’s novel ‘Monsignor Quixote’, in which a Seat plays the role of Don Quixote’s horse. ‘Adelante hombre del 600’ (loosely translated: forward, 600-man), was what you could hear in Moncho Alpuente’s wildly popular schlager at the time. A 1968 ad focused on the man in the family. “Don’t be under any illusions: she sets the color and drives. You let yourself be driven around and pay. That’s life …”

And indeed, more and more women got their own 600 as prosperity increased and a used or a new 600 became feasible as a second car. The conclusion of scientist Isabel Martín Sánchez: the Seat 600 is a ‘signature of the economic, social and cultural turnaround in the 1960s’. And she’s not the only one who thinks so. Florentino Palacios, founder of the Clubs Amigos del Seat 600 in Dénia, also underlines the major role that the 600 has played in Spanish society. “The Seat 600 has taken people from the villages and brought them to the beach. We have become mobile with this car.”

Even more important than 2CV and Beetle

But how is it possible that the 600 was even more important to Spain than cars like the Beetle were to us at the time? It starts with the fact that the Beetle had many more competitors. Think of the Citroën 2CV, but also cars such as the BMW Isetta and the NSU Prinz were in the waters of the Volkswagen. And then there were even more expensive alternatives such as the Opel Olympia and the Ford 12M. Of course, the Beetle had a large share of sales, but it was certainly not the only option.

In Spain, once home to the renowned Hispano-Suiza brand, in the mid-1950s the Biscúter without a roof and rear window gear, the tiny cars of the Kapi brand, the Renault 4CV built under license by FASA, the aging Eucort, the expensive Seat 1400 and Pegaso’s bizarrely pricey models built – that was it. All other cars had to be imported, but only on a small scale. The civil war (1936 to 1939) had seriously damaged the country and after 1945 it was internationally isolated because Franco, who had close ties to Hitler and Mussolini, had seized power and did not relinquish it. During the dictatorship, the population had to contend with sanctions, deficits, sky-high government debts and inflation. It was economically very bad, Spain was poor. More and more people moved from the countryside to the city to look for work, which, incidentally, rarely succeeded. The establishment of the state-owned company Seat, which started producing the 1400 near Barcelona from 1953, did little to change that. Only 111,000 cars drove around on Spanish roads, one per 3,000 inhabitants.

However, two important developments took place during this period. On the one hand, the technocrats in Franco’s government pushed for a more open economy and industrialization. On the other hand, the United States saw communism as the biggest threat, wanting to get strategically important Spain on its side. That Francisco Franco had hundreds of thousands of political opponents killed was apparently not that important. In 1953, the two countries agreed that the US would build military posts in Spain and in return would help to boost the Spanish economy. Spain has been a member of UNESCO since 1953, the United Nations since 1955 and the International Monetary Fund since 1958.

Seat 600 three years after Fiat 600

As a result of all developments, Spain experienced its own variant of it Wirtschaftswunder. When that started in 1957, the Seat 600 was launched. About three years after the Fiat 600 was presented to the world at the Geneva Motor Show, license production started in the free trade zone near Barcelona. The majority of the population could only dream of such a Seat. It cost 65,000 pesetas, while the average per capita income was 18,472 pesetas. The luxury tax, the extremely complicated buying process and the enormous waiting time, which initially amounted to two years, also formed obstacles.

Spaniards wanted to work for Seat at the time. Next to the factory, a complete village including shopping center, doctor’s practices and a crèche was built. If you had built up enough credit, you were allocated a home.

Economic boom in 1960s, price 600 dropped

However, wages soon started to rise: from 1960 to 1970 average incomes tripled, mainly as a result of industrialization. The industry grew on average by 9 percent per year, growth figures as they later achieved in China. A middle class emerged in society. At the same time, the price of the 600 fell. In 1957, 3 cars per 1,000 inhabitants were owned in Spain. In 1961 that number had already risen to 12 and ten years later to 71. By way of comparison: in Germany the number of cars per 1,000 inhabitants was already 612.

One in four cars in Spain was a Seat 600. When the plug was pulled from production in 1973, approximately 800,000 units had been built. Seat was the largest industrial company in the southern European country and exported 55,000 cars a year to 28 countries.

Seat 600, transversely on a carriage for transport.

The 600 was, next to the television, the symbol of the economy tree, writes Martín Sánchez in her report. At least until 1966, when Seat started producing the somewhat larger 850, say the Volkswagen Type 3 of Spain.

“The car was the great panacea of ​​the economy,” said writer Vázquez Montalbán. In this way, the 600 contributed to the happiness of the Spaniards and indirectly also to the fact that large protests broke out against Franco and his regime. Or as the Austrian ambassador in Madrid put it: “The dictatorship has become blurred by a sense of well-being.” In that respect, the 600 played a similar role to the Trabant in the GDR of the 1960s, with the difference that the Spanish regime did not prevent the arrival of new car models, but rather stimulated it. However, it is true that secret employee groups at Seat laid the foundations for the anti-Franco movement, writes Martín Sánchez.

Today, more than 30 clubs in Spain care about the heritage of the 600. Many Spaniards idealize the time when this Seat was produced as ‘those fantastic years’. That may be a bit too rosy, but one thing is a fact: both supporters and opponents of Franco fell head over heels for the Seat 600.

This story was previously published in AutoWeek Classics 01 2021

This giant billboard refers to a workshop in Madrid. On the right of the photo is a Seat 1500 (1963 to 1972).