One of my local
dealers is getting a demo car (LHD) on the 3rd July.
Here in Finland the situation is quite poor, there's one official
Cupra dealer and there's like only ONE demo car provided to the country that circles around the various
dealership places. So if you want to be among the first to recieve it, you just have to buy blindly without seeing one in person or drive several hundred kilometers just to see the demo car if you live in the wrong part of Finland.
Luckily this isn't my first blind purchase though, my Mazda 3 HB 2020 MT also was but at least I had checked like every
review there was of it so I knew probably more about the car than the
dealer itself, I was like yea, no need to explain things about the car, just let's do the paperwork and I'll drive home with this thing, fortunately the driving feel and car was exactly to my liking and it was a good purchase. We'll see how it turns out with Raval, the interior design isn't 100% to my taste but I can live with it. I've already extracted a lot from the Cupra Raval
reviews in terms of driving feel versus alternative options and Raval just seems to tick my personal boxes best, not just from this size segment but more generally seems to very well match preferences especially with VZ and being able to adjust DCC, range was borderline acceptable for what I was looking for, was looking for a 440~460 km or so minimum WLTP car as this won't be my 2nd but my only car (could borrow my parents Nissan Qashqai but I don't think that would ever happen eitherway, the driving feel is just so bad on those I feel like wanting to jump out of the car asap
)
Honda Civic 1.8 sport 2007 that was my first "proper" car also had very nicely matching driving feel, it was particularly firm ride (some guys hated that, I loved it) which didn't disturb me at all, it gave a very planted feel on the road which I loved, bet this Raval will be very similar if set to Cupra (or higher) stiffness suspension setting and the handling is also on the heavier side in Cupra setting so will be interesting to see if I prefer that or the medium setting, my Mazda 3 has a particularly heavy steering (probably similar to Cupra setting), Civic had slightly lighter (probably similar to medium would be my guess) that I generally preferred. Both cars have a very linear breaking curve so you could press a little bit and it will just slow down and have to press down further to actually stop, I hate some cars that have particularly grabby brakes that only needs little bit pressing and the curve goes like exponentially up, doesn't seem like Cupra Raval falls into that category thanks to having proper disc brakes on all wheels so theoretically probably Raval fits my braking feel preference even better than the expensier Born too.
.
