Seat has the Seat León and Byd has the “Sealion”. So there is already a legal dispute open due to the similarity of the name

What should be an unimportant procedure has become a small controversy. Seat has challenged the Registration of several byd vehicles in the Intellectual Property Office of the European Union (EUIPO) to understand that both names can be confused with models of their brand.

Specifically, Seat has filed an appeal against the record of the name of the Byd Seal, Seal U and Sealion, which are already sold in our country. But also of the Byd Seal and and Seal S, names that still do not have a vehicle awarded but that the Chinese company would be trying to register well to block the name or because in the future new models will arrive that will use these denominations.

A procedure that has been complicated

What Seat maintains in your resource is that any of these names can lead to confusion with their own denominations and, therefore, induce an unfair advantage or damage to your reputation. At least, that’s what It reads in any of the motivations of its resources.

Obviously, the possibility of inducing an error is much higher when we jump from Spanish to English or we see both options written. The most obvious is that Seal and Seat are only differentiated by a letter. Secondly, Seat León and Sealion have a very similar pronunciation in English.

For our part, we have contacted the Seat Communication Department, who claim not to give importance to the matter. They assure that it is “a usual process” when any brand seeks to register a new vehicle and that, obviously, “it can be dismissed or admitted” but that for them “is an issue that is not very important.”

At the moment, what is certain is that Byd will continue to sell its vehicles under this denomination unless it receives the refusal from the relevant institutions. It would be necessary to see if, in case of winning the appeal, the Chinese company scale or not to the courts this dispute since three of those names are already awarded to cars that are in the market.

In fact, in what we have been, Byd has enrolled more than 12,000 units In our country, of which half correspond to the Byd Seal U (6,161 units registered). The SUV is fighting with the Toyota C-HR for being the best-selling hybrid in our country at the moment. And, now, Byd is fighting to make the leap to new European markets, once its situation in the initial European markets, such as Spain, has settled.

Photo | Byd and Seat

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