It’s never fun to admit not knowing of a mainstream car’s existence, but I actually never knew the first generation Opel Corsa came as a sedan. Thanks to LDeren who found this well-worn example resting on a Finnish street, though, we can take it all in.
Not so pretty, is she? Nevertheless it’s interesting to see what might have been if GM decided to sell its European subcompact here since we’d have certainly gotten a three-box version. Instead we got the Sprint and Spectrum, both available with turbos. By the time this face lifted four-door was built in the early ’90s (the first Corsa was built between 1982 and 1993), Americans were abandoning B-segment cars at a rapid pace, but we do get one of this car’s grand daughters here today as the Sonic. As then, be sure to pick the five-door, preferably with the turbo.
Any relation to the ill fated 90s Pontiac LeMans? It bears a certain family resemblance.
Although the overall shape screams “bastard child of a Volvo and a Daewoo.”
Smaller and slightly earlier. The Pontiac LeMans was a variation of the Opel Kadett/Vauxhall Astra, the next size up. The Corsa (Vauxhall Nova in the UK) was the last new Opel before the aerodynamic styling came in. I like the Volvo/Daewoo simile – like a ‘mini-me’ 700.
There was a saloon/sedan version of the next two Corsas too, but not in all markets; we never had the later ones in the UK, for example.
http://i406.photobucket.com/albums/pp149/Corsa_B130i/DSC02052.jpg
http://bestcars.uol.com.br/carros/gm/2006/corsa-sedan-1000-premium-1.jpg
Your instinct was right when you mentioned Daewoo. The Daewoo Lemans, imported into the US by GM as the Pontiac Lemans, was derived from the Opel Kadett (as Bernard Taylor mentioned) and had similar styling, especially at the rear. It was the first Daewoo model introduced after the conglomerate took over an existing company that had a joint venture agreement with GM under which they produced the Chevette and other GM designs.
The Daewoo Lemans was quite popular in Korea and was widely used as a taxi in 1988, the year of the Seoul Olympics. Today, in a far more affluent Korea, they would be considered embarrassments.
I think the LeMans was one size bigger, wasn’t it? Kadett-based I think. And with a sedan that seemed much more natural.
It does seem small cars that were designed as hatches often suffer awkward transitions to “trunkfulness”. The current-generation Fiesta springs immediately to mind as a car that looks decidedly ungainly in sedan format. And yet, in the US market at least, manufacturers are trying to reclassify hatchbacks as more premium products by refusing to offer the lowest trim level as anything but a Sedan. Ford is bad about this but others do it too (looking at you, Kia Forte and Hyundai Elantra).
Yep. The Corsa (the model name is still around) is smaller, B-segment. The Kadett was a C-segment car. The Kadett’s successor is the Opel Astra.
Below the first gen hatchback Opel Corsa.
Oh, this was, to me, a great looking small car. Me and my friends rented a white one in Mallorca in 95. It felt solid and somewhat roomy for such a small car.
This was the GSi hot hatch with a 100 hp 1.6 liter injection engine.
These days the most powerful Opel models are called OPC:
Corsa OPC, Astra OPC, Insignia OPC.
Is this an Irmscher car or was that even more special?
No, the GSi was the factory hot hatch. Irmscher is a well-known Opel tuner.
There was an Opel Senator B Irmscher for example, with a 4.0 liter 24v inline six.
They also do other brands: http://www.irmscher.com/
Isuzu Trooper 4wds also came with Irnscher stickers though what they did I dont know later models claimed handling by lotus though they corner appallingly
As an Ami who visited Germany in the 1970’s and fell in love with Irmscher Opels back then, I would love to have one here in the States.
As it is now, we can’t get any “real” Opels over here anyway.
My wife wants a MINI, but I’d go for a Fiat 500 first. But, if the Opel Adam were here, that would be first on my list. An Adam OPC is too much to wish for.
4.0-24v, an Irmscher only.
Edit: I checked the German Wikipedia site about the Corsa A (first gen). The informal name for the GSi seemed to be “Irmscher-Corsa” because Irmscher did the engine management system.
Here’s an “official” Irmscher Corsa, it certainly looked wilder than the GSi…
…yet it had a less powerful 83 hp 1.3 liter injection engine.
The brand new 207 hp Opel Corsa OPC. Also with a 1.6 liter injection engine, plus a turbo charger.
Call it a Buick in the US and there’s GM’s Ford Fiesta ST competitor.
Certainly sounds like a recipe for fun, but I don’t think a car that size fits with Buick’s “alternative to Lexus” current approach. However, if they could transplant that engine into the Verano as a T-type or GS trim level and turn up the boost a bit to compensate for the higher weight…you might have something.
No need to turn op the boost of the 1.6 engine.
Opel Astra OPC (C-segment car): 2.0 liter turbo, 280 hp.
Opel Insignia OPC (D-segment car): 2.8 liter V6 turbo, 325 hp.
The Opel Insignia already has a Buick equivalent in the US, the Regal.
The Regal has a 259 HP 2.0 turbo–I presume that’s a variant of the engine you listed for use in the Astra OPC. In that case, maybe the real answer to spice up Buick would be to drop the 2.0 turbo in the Verano instead of the 180 HP NA motor that’s currently in that car, and give us that 2.8 turbo for the Regal GS.
I do quite like that Corsa OPC, it just doesn’t strike me as a Buick. Chevy could take it but they’ve already got the Sonic. Hmmm.
I’ve read that the next gen Opel Adam (geozinger mentioned it above) might also get a Buick edition.
Below the current model. It’s an A-segment car (a mini), so smaller than the Corsa.
An expensive little premium (there’s that word again…) hatchback.
There’s no Opel Adam OPC -yet- but the Adam S pictured below has a 150 hp 1.4 liter turbo engine. Fast little rocket. Excuse me, a fast little premium rocket….
Opel seems to be back on track again after a whole series of dark years. I especially like the D-segment Insignia sedan.
It’s not too bad. Transforming modern small hatchbacks, with a strong wedge shape, into a sedan: that’s ugly in capital letters. UGLY.
This little Opel Corsa was one of the last small sedans that sold reasonably well in Northwestern Europe. People in other parts of the world still seem to like small sedans though.
Ugh I remember when it was announced the Fiesta would come to our shores, I thought “cool!”, then when I saw them unveiled at the Chicago Auto Show I saw not a 2 door hatch as I expected, but a sea of these ugly things. Ugh
That gets my vote for worst 3 box adaption too.
This may be the first thing I agree with you about. The hatchback Fiesta looks better than it is, while the sedan looks positively clumsy. The Sonic sedan looks no worse than the hatchback to me.
It’s about as unstylish as the Volkswagen Quantum in the “Bad Old Days” post, but I don’t find them both to be offensive; just…NOTHING.
I think they’re more than bland–they’re downright bleak (which I think can be cool, mind you, but it doesn’t speak to a deft stylistic effort).
Surely its granddaughter is the… Opel Corsa? The Sonic is more of a Daewoo isn’t it?
The Sonic is a Corsa redone by GM Korea (Daewoo) to be more in line with American tastes and cheaper, but it’s an Opel platform and engine.
I had one of these, but mine was a Vauxhall Nova in the UK. One litre pushrod engine with 4 gears, so the lowest of the low spec. It was a pretty dull car, but very cheap motoring. Very easy to work on as well – iirc the oil filter was stuck out on a big stalk in the most easily accessible position possible.
I flogged it up and down the M4 motorway and around London and Bristol for a few years and it never gave me the slightest trouble. As far as cheap transport appliances go it was perfect, but as a driving and visual experience, it was pretty meh.
I have two memories that stand out. One was when the clutch cable snapped and I had to get it half across London using the starter motor to get it going at lights and crunching through the gears. Which abuse it took without a murmur.
The other was when I went on a 2 week trip across Europe in a 7.5 ton lorry. After 2 weeks of sitting up high in the big truck with a long wafty gear lever and big pedal movements, I got back into my little Nova and almost laughed. It felt like I was sitting on the floor of a formula one car, with tight precise controls and razor-sharp handling. The feeling lasted about 30 seconds and then I was back in my cruddy little Nova again…
I actually like this better than the so called “LeMans” of the ’90s, Maybe I’m weird!
Not many small hatch to small conversions look good, but this is a bit of a dud, visually. It just looks like boxes put up against each other; completely unintegrated, unlike the current Fiesta saloon we’re not allowed.
Great car that it was , the first Ford Focus saloon was a big…too edgy….
Think that’s awful? The 2-door Corsa TR is even more ungainly!
Wow, that one is pretty terrible indeed!
The odd position of the fuel filler doesn’t help either.
Styling-wise, I thought these cars were just fine. I’d have liked it if the TR had the same box-flares as the hatchback though.
That was my father’s 3 car in a horrible green color called “Verde cañaveral” (canaveral green).
Pah, that’s exactly the car which my future wife’s mother was driving when we first met… But as luck had it, her brother was working for Saab in Trollhättan at that time. He had a fantastic blue 9-3 Viggen convertible (one of the greatest – and strangely unappreciated – Saabs ever if you ask me), which more than evened things out.
Something about it’s look just says “taxi” or “fleet sedan” to me.
I rented a 2-door hatch (3-door) Corsa in Zurich, for almost a month of driving all over northern Europe (as far south as Florence) then over to the UK and back, in 1984. I think it was an 1100, presumably a 5 speed (though could it have just been a 4 speed?). I remember it as very pleasant to drive and fast enough for local conditions, even pulling 150-160 km/hr on the Autobahn. Was the first of these 2-box to 3-box conversions seen in the Golf-to-Jetta transformation? Of course, after the Civic and Accord went through the same evolution, the 2-box was almost dead in the US for a long time.
Production of the Accord 4-door began 2 years before VW started building Jettas. The Accord 4-door reached the US for the 1979 model year, while the Jetta came here as a 1980. The gap shrunk because Honda didn’t export the 4-door Accord until a year after production started. The Civic sedan was released in 1980.
Summer 1979 in the latter case, but the point remains. (The Ballade arrived in August 1980, but the Civic sedan was introduced a little over a year earlier.)
The VW Derby was a 3-box version of the Polo, and preceded the Jetta by appearing in 1977.
The Renault 5 also had a little known three-box version, the Renault 7, which appeared in 1974. Quite an odd looking thing!
In my opinion this Renault 7 takes the cake in the worst hatch to 3-box conversion contest. I saw it in Spain.
Of today’s market I am thinking about the Nissan Versa Sedan: why did they even bother! This should have been a 5 door hatch only design, just like the Renault 4 used to be.
It was a Spanish version as well
It was a really slow car.
Ha Ha, knew soembody would come up with this, Spanish made and for the Spanish market only the Renault Siete.
It looks like a mini-Volvo 740/760 compacted/crumpled on both ends of the car by an early 1980s Lincoln Town Car front and back.
My nephews bought a rusty Nova(the Vauxhall one not the Chevy) 4 door with 3 weeks tax & MOT for £55.They went to the Download festival in it with no problems and got £80 breaking it for spares when the MOT & tax ran out.It did duty as a pub car,drive to town hit the bars and clubs when it’s parked and come back for it the next day knowing it wont be stolen or vandalised.Not bad value,try hiring a car for 3 weeks for £55 and getting a £25 profit!
I have two of these they are excellent cars. Go well huge carrying capacity.cheap spares if I were to be asked to choose a car to see me out it would be this or a mark four astrspa.
The Mini wasn’t a hatchback, but surely the Riley Elf qualifies as an early 2-box to 3-box conversion.
Bizarrely I saw a blue Vauxhall Nova two-door saloon this weekend, the first one I’ve seen in about ten years. It looked tiny and fragile compared to all the other traffic.
One thing I always found odd about the Nova / Corsa was that the three-door hatch had wheelarch blisters like an Audi Quattro, whereas the two-door saloon ( as well as the later four-door saloon and five-door hatch) had conventional arches.
The sedan versions of the 1980’s Opel Corsa were quite common on the streets in Spain. As the lines of Corsas from this era were mostly straight, the trunk appeared well integrated and not grafted on, in my opinion. Having a different taillight design for the sedan may have set it apart from the hatchback version better. The sedan versions of hatchbacks look somewhat awkward on recent cars due to curvier and upswept belt lines. The sedan version of the Peugeot 206 is a good example. Drivers in Turkey and in northern Africa seem to prefer sedan versions of hatchbacks like the Renault Megane, Clio, Ford Focus and Peugeot 206, as they were pretty common there.
Clarification Please: is it correct to say that the above Peugeot 206 had not have back-up lights?? Is this common on European vehicles or specific to various regions???
It has back up lamps; the lenses have red striping over the reverse bulb that “hides” the clear appearance until lit. You can still make out where the back up lamp would be in the top left area of this taillight:
Thanks!! I don’t remember seeing this feature on Detroit Iron!!!
http://www.wsj.com/articles/indian-car-makers-enhance-the-hatchback-1412767857
My sources tell me that in austria and germany, the Corsa Sedan is “affectionally” referred to as ex-waffen-SS pensioners’ rides… But I’ve yet to confirm this theory.
No wonder the Corsa is a heck of a lot more popular as a hatch, even today.
Drove a Corsa 5-door in France a couple of years ago. Diesel model. Actually fairly peppy, with a decent ride and a good interior space considering its wheelbase and exterior dimensions.
Personally, I was never impressed by the DS Presidentiale, nor its SM successor.
Well, one of the cars in my life. Maybe I should write a COAL about this model, although my father bought the 2-door version of it, called TR. He bought it the 22nd of June of 1983. Opel had just started building these cars in the then-new factory in Figueruelas, that’s about 25km away from Zaragoza in Spain. It was marketed in Spain as “Affordable German engineering”. My surprise was learning that GM was, indeed, an American company. At that time, although Spain was not in the EEC, tariffs were extremely low, so we could get and sell car in Europe.
Our version was the 1.2liter “Luxus” version with 5 spd. It was a horrible color called “canaveral green” which I can’t find online. It was also green inside. I also learned to drive in that car. I had the catalogue at home and we were spared the horrible “1.0l base model” but we didn’t get the better 1.3. I remember that it was a OHC engine, as the mechanic pointed that to us.
It served us adequately. My finacially prudent mother didn’t allow my father to buy a bigger car, so it was the transportation method for a family of 4 (my brother being just a new-born). The only redeeming quality of that car was the trunk but I personally hated not having a window behing, nor AC. Can you imagine being stuck behind those large windows in summer in Southern Europe? It was, however, a huge improvement over our previous Seat 127 (which would be now a cooler classic, though).
I remember quite a few things about that car. Long road trips from Barcelona to my mother’s village, 900km away, in summer, sweating like a pig. I also remember that this car had metal showing inside, although it was covered by a thick vinyl-like layer, which melted after a couple of summers.
The car was quite realiable but my father got finally rid of it because of not-so-good brakes and a mechanical glitch. When the car had about 80k km, it started to jerk and the engine would also shut off afterwards. This hapenned for the first time when we were crossing the Manzanal Mountain Pass. We had to get road assistance and they changed the spark plugs. But the car had the same issue 500km later when we were driving back from our vacations to Barcelona, near Zaragoza. We had to get towed in the toll motorway to a mechanic.
It turns out that, being near Zaragoza (where the factory is), the mechanic knew about a glitch about these engines and the solution was simply blowing air in it, with the gas cap open. Once this done, the car would run for 1000-2000km without further problems until it repeated itself.
My father got really pissed about this situation and it finally sold it in 1990 to buy a new Ford Orion, which also had a “mistery mechanical glitch”. But that’s another story
I had the “horrible 1.0L base model”. It had no head restraints, just blanking plugs in the seat holes where they would be fitted. Looking at those blanking plugs always made me feel like I owned the most basic car in the world.
Luckily I never had an accident in it, so was spared whiplash injuries.
As I passed my driving test (on 1st April 1985 – I half expected the tester to shout April Fool after passing me) on a Vauxhall Nova saloon – a red 1.2L, DPV 188Y – now no doubt long since gone for baked bean tins as 2 years and 80,000 miles as a driving school car had left it pretty baggy even in 1985 – I have a soft spot for these. The hatches were far more popular in Britain but the saloons sold reasonably to a niche market of saloon buyers – the only rival was the VW Polo Classic/Derby.
Now all Novas a rare sight as the newest is now over 20 years old and for a long time they were the choice of the impoverished boy racer.
On the whole, the straight-edge styling of the time lent itself better to 3-box conversion than the later taste for curvy cars. In case it hasn’t yet been mentioned, may I mention the Renault Thalia – a 4-door saloon version of the Mk 2 Renault Clio. No picture to hand but anyone Googling it will I am sure agree with me that it looks decidedly humpty-backed.