"gzdesign" (gzdesign)
10/09/2013 at 18:45 • Filed to: SEAT FIAT Spain Leon Ronda Ritmo Strada Law Copyright
1
0|
"gzdesign" (gzdesign)
10/09/2013 at 18:45 • Filed to: SEAT FIAT Spain Leon Ronda Ritmo Strada Law Copyright | 1
| 0 |
You may or may not know the spanish brand SEAT. Maybe you might have heard of them lately for making some !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . That wasn't always the case, though.
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SEAT started in 1950 to produce complete knockdowns of FIAT models. !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! were then locally produced in Spain, as the manufacturing capabilities slowly began to improve. Since SEAT was then a state-owned company which enjoyed a closed market, it began to churn out cars by the thousands.
Quality was a bit of an issue back then, but I guess that when you have to wait for years slaloming the red tape of a dictatorship's planned economy to get one, you'd rather brag about it.
Case in point: the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , a Fiat 600 save for the badges and some mechanical components, was the symbol of the spanish wirtschaftswunder. For around 10-15 years in Spain, you would walk down a street and see only that model, except if what you came across was a police cars or one of those !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .
With that massive amount of practice, they ended up producing cars to acceptable quality standards during the late 1960s-early 1970s, so when the market was slowly opened to foreign subsidiaries like Renault or Citroën, they still retained the big slice on the cake.
However, by the 1980s, profund disagreements between the Agnelli family and the spanish government (SEAT was a government company at the time) led to the end of the cooperation to produce Fiat licensed models.
As the story goes, SEAT didn't have much resources to pull off some original cars to begin with, so what they did is modify the Seat Ritmo (Fiat Ritmo/Fiat Strada in the US). Allegedly, not far enough from the original model, since what followed was that Fiat sued SEAT for copyright infringement. By some accounts, though, the real reason was that the new design was quite close to what Fiat was working on to facelift the Ritmo.
Anyway, the battle had to be won more on the media than on the courts, since what really was on stake was SEAT's reputation as an independent brand.
Then they really pulled off a nice trick.
They conceived a plan that was quite simple: Think show and tell, but with a car and in front of a judge. They worked out to use a production model, completely disassemble it, paint the Fiat parts black and the new parts yellow, and then use it as evidence in the media.
SEAT won the case.
Picture credits:Wikipedia, Seat.es, Seatforos.com