Opel Agila

Pictured below are a recent spyshot of a future Opel small car and a CGI. Let’s call it Agila since it’s the name of the equivalent vehicle in current Opel’s lineup. Note that Opel is trying to establish their own fashion in car dressing with the use of black net in the lateral windows… most prototypes use black plastic or tape, sometimes Peugeot-Citroen use a sort of plastic bags to disguise the cars, Toyota uses some ridiculous things that look like cardboard bits and recently Renault started dressing their cars in white. Not sure if black net in the windows is the new black of prototype-disguising fashion but I think the test-driver must feel very sad in that thing.

The new small-Opel is a tall vehicle obviously engineered to maximize space. Other followers of this trend include the Renault Modus, Honda Jazz or Peugeot 1007. None of these cars is a great sales success… actually the most popular small and cheap cars in Europe are the triplets 107/C1/Aygo that are of the small and cute type. The new Twingo is also small and cute as well as the next Ka and Fiat 500 that is small and super-cute. And it makes sense that young people buying their first car search for a cool design instead the practicality of a bigger luggage space. This means that the next Agila will not be a sales success. Probably product planners didn’t research properly or had the necessary vision when they chosen this type of design but I’m sure they have figured out by now that their next small car will not do well. And they must feel sad because of that.

Of course they could have asked Auto-Future for advice and we would give it for a nice chunk of money (because it’s Opel, for most of other brands we would do it for free). But when the design of the car was frozen (probably about one and a half year ago) this joint didn’t exist yet. This blog made its first anniversary in March 6th. Actually I forgot about it and didn’t signal or commemorate the event. I feel a bit sad because of that. So today we have a sad test-driver, some sad product planners and designers and a sad blog writer. Why not having a look at sniffpetrol site for some fun?... but guess what, the bloke that writes in that joint did the February issue and promised the next month issue for March 9th… and until today nothing! I hope he’s ok!