Did I just win the 2012 competition for blog title of the year because I made it into a palindrome? Or was it anagram?
Some of you may know that Opel – which is basically mainland-European for Vauxhall – is a part of American automotive giant General Motors. You know, they do something general, with motors. What most of you probably do not know is that Opel started exactly 150 year ago, at the time producing sewing machines, and that the German carmaker’s founder was called Adam. Adam Opel. He started building cars in 1899, then sold out to the Americans between 1929 (80% of shares) and 1931 (the rest).
Fast-forward. It’s 2012 and Opel is still owned by GM. It’s in poor financial shape, which is for a large part accountable to the fact that it has very limited sales outside of Europe (GM has got hands full of other brands for that). And in Europe crisis is currently omnipresent in the very air and we Europeans are just not buying many automobiles. But that’s not actually deserved for Opel, as they have really reinvented the brand in the past years and have come up with a completely refreshed line-up of snazzy looking rides. Think back about ten years and compare and the progress in terms of design will become very clear to you.
Moreover, Opel is fighting hard. Did it recently announce a new set of engines – better and more efficient – there’s also a(nother) new model in the making. It’s to be a womanizer – at least by the looks of it – and needed a cute and sexy name, not something that traditionally ends with ‘A’. Opel picked Adam, honouring its founder and suggesting every Adam needs an Eve.
The fun thing is that it’s not yet fully clear what Adam will look like. Still, the internet is full of unofficial images of it, many based off spy shots of the mules Opel has running around for testing purposes. They all look a bit different, yet the similarities are clear and all of them suggest Adam will be a pretty and young looking car and that it will have everything to make the female sex feel attracted to it.
All the more sorrow I feel, as I fear Opel may be overambitious. After all, Adam is an Opel and does not have the cute heritage of a Fiat 500 or Mini, nor the French flamboyance of a Citroen DS3.
Adam is an Opel and it, unfortunately and unjustly, still suffers from its image.
