Cupra Formentor VZ5 | PH Fleet
Our five-cylinder Formentor has been uphill and down dale - when not coming to a sudden stop
It would be hard to argue that technology hasn’t made driving a car safer overall. True, we’ve encountered no software-based system that truly rivals an attentive, experienced human behind the wheel - but human beings are scarily fallible when you start throwing in variables. The tech never gets tired or hungry or distracted by a phone call or what’s going past the window. It does its job relentlessly and methodically, and if it has been thoughtfully programmed and exhaustively tested, it will do it very well.
But all such systems have bugs and peccadillos, and because there is an understandable tendency among carmakers to err on the side of safety, it is not unusual for well-meaning tech to deploy unevenly - or even when it’s not wanted. The most prominent example of this is surely lane-keep assist, deemed essential by EU legislators, but so universally scorned by car owners (or anyone writing about them) that any OEM worth its salt offers a shortcut to turn it off.
Our Formentor does fairly well in this regard. Very well if you prefer physical switchgear to touchscreen commands: you push a dedicated button on the steering wheel and Lane Assist and Speed warning (the second horseman of the maddening apocalypse) pop up together on the instrument cluster, and can be extinguished one after the other using the selector on the opposite side. Once the memory muscle is established, you’re bong-free in about two seconds.
Nevertheless, there are other issues. The automatic emergency brake function is not something you typically think to turn off given its one job is to prevent you from having a head-on collision. But faced with Cornwall’s single-track roads on a recent family holiday, the Formentor’s version of the tech repeatedly fell at the first hurdle - i.e. not going off when it doesn’t need to. After all, it is merely a nuisance when lane-keep assist nibbles at the steering; emergency stops for no good reason are potentially dangerous if there’s a car directly behind you.
If nothing else, unprompted heavy braking drives you up the wall. And though you might argue that Cornwall is a testing environment when it comes to assessing the risk of cars driving directly at you, these systems are supposed to be sufficiently robust that they do not activate unless a collision really is imminent. But we had no issue in replicating the problem for the purposes of a photograph; further proof that it has not been configured properly. Or at any rate not sufficiently well to work everywhere, in all conditions.
This was unfortunate for the Formentor, because otherwise it performed respectably well in the West Country. Holidays are meat and potatoes for C-segment crossovers, given practicality, convenience and scale are among their defining characteristics - but Cupra’s flagship is sufficiently quiet and comfortable to make the prospect of a five-hour journey (even after work on a Friday) seem undemanding. Moreover, at varying speeds - i.e. between M25 slog and A303 sprint - the car recorded 30.7mpg over 225 miles, which isn’t bad when you consider its combined WLTP score is 27.9.
That obviously dipped somewhat when journeying between holiday cottage and assorted scenic cliff tops, although the rate at which the needle drops is always compensated by the five-pot’s capacity for transporting you to a different place mentally. Admittedly this does require space in the VZ5 (the engine’s reputation for being at its best beyond 4,000rpm is well deserved), and ideally without nieces and nephews aboard - unless you want to endure a telling off later on at the dinner table.
Assuming you’ve found your way back to the dinner table, that is. The Formentor’s sat nav is a curious affair: fine when up and running, but woe betide anyone trying to tackle the search function if you’re on the move. And that’s thanks to an unerring tendency for putting the most bizarre results at the top of the page: i.e. a keyword search for Heathrow (as pictured), offers you a choice of two hotels, a BP Pulse charging station and a cash machine - but not immediately the option of driving to one of the planet’s largest and most important airports.
Still, we’re getting on fine with the VZ5 more generally. And in one respect a week spent in Cornwall, with its farm tracks and gravelly car parks, is a fair reminder that even though the Formentor barely ranks as an SUV in an off-road sense, the inch or two of additional ground clearance it buys you does occasionally come in handy. It comfortably went places you might be reluctant to drive an Audi RS3. Hardly a dealbreaker for a dyed-in-the-wool hot hatch buyer - but another reason why a 390hp Formentor makes a sliver of sense.
FACT SHEET
Car: 2026 Cupra Formentor VZ5 4Drive DSG
Run by: PH Staff
Mileage: 2,812
On fleet since: July 2026
Price as tested: £67,605 (including Matte Paint, £2,095; Panoramic Sunroof, £1,015)
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