Way back in 2007, at the other site, I posited that GM should just have federalized the new gen1 Opel Ascona (Opel 1900 in the US) instead of building an all-new subcompact, the ill-fated Vega (That post is here at CC). So when I saw this shot by Curtis Perry of a gen2 Ascona in Greece, it obviously made me imagine how things would have unfolded if the gen2 Ascona also replaced the gen1 version in the US, in about 1976. Sure beats the ’76-’77 Vega or the Monza Town coupe.
And of course the next step would have been in 1981, when the new GM J-cars were world cars anyway, and the Ascona and Cavalier shared the same basic platform and body. A perfectly natural progression, instead of the dead end Vega.
Those were all over the place here in Europe. Perfect first car when they got a bit older and very cheap to buy. I owned one, probably a 79 model, around 1989. Got wrecked when it was rearended by a ambulance lossing control on it’s way to a jogger with a heart attack. After 45 minutes, ambulance got back to me, with dead jogger inside, to handle the insurance papers. Got some few 100 guildres more for the wreck then I payed for it. Win for me. Big loss for the poor jogger.
I’ve followed your prior pieces on why GM should’ve used the Ascona as the basis for the Vega. It’s almost unbelievable that the disdain for “not invented here” that was prevalent the time applied not only to Asian and European makes, but also to GM’s own non-US divisions!
But the last paragraph of this piece captured my imagination. Given that the J-cars were developed and used across the world, and given the mediocrity of the US versions when they were released, I wonder how a Ascona/Vega mashup would’ve turned out.
And now that I think about it, Ascona/Holden Camira/Vauxhall Cavalier/Vega. I forgot about the British and Australian versions that could’ve been made as well.
(For some reason I couldn’t edit my original post).
I seem to recall that the German Deutsche Mark went nuts versus the US dollar in the 70’s, and this hurt German imports. But to take the already exceptional Ascona and modify & manufacture in the US, well, that could have been a history changer. Even at higher prices these were impressive, and I can only imagine how GM’s history would have fared had they been committed to the best for a market instead of “not invented here”.
I remember a friend that had a Manta, and thinking that this was totally unlike the American offerings.
Woulda, shoulda, coulda…
I don’t know that it would have been easy for GM to “federalize” an Opel product at this time. I seem to recall they couldn’t do it with the Diplomat because Fisher Body couldn’t meet the required tolerances to produce the body shell and so the developed the Seville from the X body instead. I recognize they managed the Chevette, but I suspect this was only doable because the T body had been engineered from the beginning to be produced in developing countries.
I had three Gen 1’s… a Manta and two 1900 Sportwagons. They were wonderful cars, and as I recall GM stopped importing them because the exchange rate between the mark and the dollar made them prohibitively expensive here. The Isuzu-sourced replacements made economics work but the cars didn’t measure up. As pointed out above, had GM made the Gen 2 Ascona here it’s possible that the product would have been modified in the wrong directions. A real shame, but perhaps we dodged seeing Asconas with padded Landau roofs!
…and a heavily Broughamized interior. I searched for Ascona B interior pictures, and this seems to be the most plush trim level from the factory.
Other than the black upper dash and ,maybe some fake wood on the console, that’s about what would’ve done for a high-trim level small Chevy in the mid ’70s. There would’ve been Brougham exterior trim options, and I don’t see them having shipped many 4-doors with Rally wheels like the lead car, but most sales would’ve been of moderately equipped tintops.
The first gen Ascona was so stodgy looking though. Not hip and swinging like the Vega, which really was a nice looking car in its time. Looks did improve dramatically for the second gen Ascona though.
My dad had a 1974 Opel Sportswagon that was literally his poor man’s BMW as he couldn’t afford the BMW 2002 that he really wanted. It was a yellow 4-speed and one of his favorite cars of the many he owned. Alas, he totaled it into a telephone pole as he was an alcoholic and drove home from a business dinner. He credited the 3-point seatbelts with saving his life. He hitchhiked home and somehow escaped prosecution despite a late night police visit to our house.
These started off with the old pushrod 1200cc motor in Europe, but if you were lucky you got the 1600 cam-in-head version. I got reasonably close to ‘owning’ one in the late 70’s but there was some kind of industrial dispute going on and there were none available at the time – and certainly no hope of discount.
In practice, 18 years plus a few months, that was roughly the minimum age you could get a driver’s license here.
In our secondary school’s last year, spring 1983, us kids were 17. So no one had a driver’s license yet…except this cool repeater guy in our class. So there he was, just a few weeks before graduation, arriving at the schoolyard in his used but pristine and very shiny Opel Ascona B 2.0 SR. With a big smilie on his face.
My (our) very first classmate with his own car. I’m quite sure it was in the same color as the one below.
At the end of the day, he roared away in his Opel, while the rest of us went home riding our bike or moped. Gazelle, Sparta, Zündapp, Kreidler, Yamaha or whatever.
Dressed up Ascona B’s (wide tires, stand-alone front fog lamps, rear window louvers) were popular amoung young guys in my neck of the woods. Especially the ones with a 2.0 liter engine, which speaks for itself.
The 2.0 Diesel was assembled here as a taxicab for a couple of years. It was very noisy and uncomfortable but drivers loved it for its reliability. A private user would have to pay as much for it as for a Rekord 2.0 petrol car, so few were sold that way
Ascona B diesels were uncommon here. A gasoline Ascona with an LPG system was the preferred choice for folks who drove a lot, like sales representatives. The Ford Taunus was the Ascona’s main competitor, the Taunus never had a diesel engine. A 1.6 liter gasoline engine was the middle-of-the-road most common choice in that segment.
The Ascona 2.0 SR , mentioned above, had a 100 DIN-hp gasoline engine. You were the man with that kind of power back then!
Our version was the Vauxhall Cavalier and was contemporary with the Ford Sierra. Suddenly motoring had changed. Cars were reliable and started first time without fiddling around with chokes. You no longer had to carry a toolbox in the boot and spare condenser and points, unless you were daft enough to have bought a BL car.
We had a Cavalier estate, brilliant car, the first one you could just use as an appliance.
Ascona B was 1975-1981. The Ford Sierra was introduced in 1982, so the FWD Ascona C (GM’s J-Car) was the Sierra’s contemporary competitor.
Sorry, my mistake. The first generation Ascona/Cavalier was a RWD, and was superceded by the much more modern FWD version which I was referring to. It might have been better than contemporary US offerings but the FWD model was the real step forward.
The subject vehicle looks like an 8/10 scale Nova sedan of the same vintage. I never appreciated them at the time but the Nova sedan is rather handsome (like the Ascona).
The Rehord D (1972-77) is a larger example of the same design, and it can be likened to a 9/10s of a 75/79 Nova
But GM didn’t even need to borrow their German engine. They already had a good reliable four, developed for the Chevy II and then abandoned. It was smoother than the Iron Duke and infinitely better than the Vega’s simulated “engine”.
Not Invented Here wasn’t really GM’s problem. Alcohol-fueled ego was their problem. They were constantly pulling Hold My Beer stunts instead of sticking with their own foreign or domestic developments. “Hey dude! I’m going to invent a brand new engine using all sorts of technologies never used before, and then I’m going to manufacture it without testing! Just watch!”
One counterpoint to the thought that Europe had the entire answer ready for GM.
The engines in these, at least as 1900’s, were fitted to various Holdens in the ’70’s, and they weren’t very good. In fact, they were known in road tests and in reality as noisy slugs, and heavy on fuel for all the fuss. I used to travel in one such car quite a bit in late high-school, and can confirm that it was slow and most unrefined. The owner, a friend’s mum, used to complain about the economy too, (though to be fair, she was somewhat eccentric and so her view on this topic, as with many others, could have been anywhere from correct to made-up, but I’m digressing).
If GM had used those german Opels as a basis for their small domestic US cars, they could have easily defeated the japanese imports. I will never understand why GM USA made their own (ill-fated) attempt, when everything was right before their eyes.
In Europe all asian imports were nearly wiped off the map by Skoda. VW just bought the Skoda factory, modernized it an let them do their thing. Renault did the same with their Dacia brand from Romania (Bulgaria?). However, since then Toyota never gained a market share of more than 5% in Europe. That’s much, Honda is a 1% seller, other japanese/asians have left the european playground.
Nissan has two manufacturing plants and sells 400-500,000 cars a year there, though they are partnered globally with Renault (and now Mitsubishi). That’s about 4% of the market or so.
Mind, I agree GM in the US could have saved consumers from awful cars and themselves a lot of money if they’d only looked in their very own company elsewhere.
I found this interesting and have looked up the numbers for Europe.
Toyota 4.4%
Hyundai/Kia 3.2%
Nissan 1.8%
Honda 0.5%
Mitsubishi had 1.8% but has left the european market in june 2020.
Blimey! The entire Japanese and then Korean estate combined has less than 10% of a market where EU-local VW Group has 25%.
I did read last year that Nissan wants out of its Euro plants in Spain and the UK (leaving just Jaguar/LR as the only Brit carmaker), and can only assume it exports stuff outside the EU to survive on those figures currently.
The Euros not only were chauvanistic historically – arguably justifiably in terms of their former design superiority – it seems they still are, and very.
There’s also a deliberate push on within the the Nissan-Renault alliance towards regionalizing the three main brand groups of so that Renault faces no or little internal competition in Europe, Nissan “specializes” in the Americas and Mitsubishi in East Asia and Australia.
Note that the European car market is very fragmented. Just an example, there must be around 15 C-segment hatchbacks I can choose from (as in brands from Europe/Japan/South-Korea).
VW Golf, Audi A3 Sportback, Seat Leon, Skoda Octavia. That’s already four of them, VAG-Group only.
Although I believe producing an American Ascona would have been better than a Vega, history shows not everything is so rosy…Although more reliable than the Vega, the “global” Ford Escort produced in the US turned out to be similar in profile only, sharing very few parts and we all know how inferior the American ones were to European Escorts
Sort of the point I was making in my comment above. The J-cars were produced across the world, but the US they were slow and undefined, compared to their competitors. In fact, some felt that for all their flaws, some felt the Escort/Lynx was more refined.
The problem with the Escort is the same as what GM was doing. While Ford took some ideas from the European Escort, they refused to make a copy of it here in the US, and made changes that were detrimental to the car. Had GM took the Ascona and Americanized it like the Escort, it would have suffered the same.
The point being made was “what if”, as in what if the car was just federalized and brought over for production in the USA, much like they did later with the Opels that became Saturns, then Buicks. Bring over the tooling to a factory in North America, and make the same car as in Europe. It could have been done then, and the whole globalization would have probably led to the idea of regions creating models based on their special talents – small/sporty in Europe, small in Asia, and big in America. That was GMs modus operandi up until they sold Opel and closed Holden.
I found a great book on Amazon that describes what GM was thinking during this time. It is “The Decline and Fall of the US Auto Industry” by Brock Yates. It describes the decisions to produce the Vega and Chevette instead of importing the European cars. It then goes on to describe in great detail how they attempted to copy the great Honda Accord and ended up with the perfectly mediocre Chevy Cavalier, Cadillac Cimmeron etc.
Certainly, the Ascona, as the Cavalier, fixed it for Vauxhall. And the Cavalier Sportshatch showed the Capri what was necessary as well.
I owned a 1975 Ascona starting in 1978, and it was a great car. A dealer told me that they had already federalized a bunch of cars that never made it over when the dollar dropped versus the mark. I would love to find one, especially if it was a higher spec SRi version.
Many American cars were developed around the original structure and layout of German Opel Ascona 3rd generation , being Cadillac Cimarron the best disguise to hide its origins.
Curiously in Brazil was also produced by GM do Brasil with the name Chevrolet Monza and it was a lot of car for the money , a very succesful competent vehicle